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This secret speech gave people heart attacks: when Khrushchev denounced Stalin
Seventy years ago, Nikita Khrushchev stood before a packed hall in central Moscow and delivered a four-hour denunciation of Josef Stalin, one that exposed mass terror and attempted to reclaim the legacy of Leninism. So what drove this extraordinarily radical move? And did the Soviet people buy Khrushchev’s message?
When I was an undergraduate, a perennial exam question was ‘Did Stalin betray the revolution?’. The question gets to the heart of Soviet history, and I still ask my students to address it. What does it mean? It suggests that Stalin’s policies, especially in the 1930s, were either a logical consequence of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 or they were a deadly departure from its promises. At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin consolidated his personal hold on power, he made a sharp leftward turn. His programme was headlined by a centrally planned economy, the collectivisation of agriculture, and breakneck industrialisation. It sounds like the fruits of a socialist revolution. Mass state violence accompanied this ‘great break’ in Soviet life. Collectivisation led to falls in grain output and the forcible transfer of some of it to industrial centres; famine followed, killing millions, worst of all in Ukraine. The network of Gulag labour camps dramatically expanded. Enemies of the people – innocent men and women – were shot in their hundreds of thousands during the Great Terror of 1936–38. Did these appalling atrocities subvert the liberations of 1917? Or were they the natural follow-up to the terrors of the civil war (1917–22) and a predictable explosion of the implied violence of socialism? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/HIP2591053-6c687f8-e1776154310242.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Soviet propaganda poster depicts a large hand gripping a sword marked with the hammer and sickle, slicing through a snake labeled with words such as espionage, sabotage, and provocation. The left side is dark with the snake, while the right shows a bright, orderly cityscape. Russian text urges vigilance." title="A poster from 1953 proclaims “Vigilence is Our Weapon. Be Vigilant!” Millions of people had died as a result of Stalin’s violent policies during his long rule (Image by Topfoto)" /> Generations of students have written essays about whether Stalinism represented the true colours of socialism or whether it had nothing in common with the real ethics of the left. But the question was also crucial in real time, not merely decades after the event. When Nikita Khrushchev posed the question – did Stalin betray the revolution? – he turned the course of Soviet history. A rising Soviet star Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to political power seemed to fulfil the promise of the Bolshevik revolution. He was born in the village of Kalinovka, in Kursk province, in 1894. He worked as a shepherd when he was still a child. It was a tough, poor, hardscrabble life. When he was 14, the family moved to Yuzovka – today’s Donetsk – in the nearby Donbas. He trained as a metalworker and had the gift of getting on in life; when he got married in 1914, he and his wife had their own, quite decent apartment. But he worked crushing shifts during the First World War and then endured the lethal lottery of revolution and civil war, during which his wife died of typhus. Khrushchev was a hard worker, gregarious, ambitious and politically curious. He immersed himself in the diverse socialist landscape of the revolutionary Donbas and became a Bolshevik. Like so many others with proletarian credentials, he was propelled forward and upwards by the revolution. He embarked upon a new career in party and government administration in what was now the Ukrainian republic of the USSR. He rose closer to the centre of republican power. His bosses marked him out as a rising star. In 1929, they facilitated his move to Moscow. By 1935, he was in charge of Moscow city and region, a kind of super-mayor of the socialist capital. In 1938, he went back to Kyiv, but this time as boss of the whole Ukrainian republic. He was an ethnic Russian, but he had lived in Ukraine for half his life. The year after, he was elevated to the Politburo. Khrushchev had made it big, and he owed it all to the revolution. He was a pragmatic careerist and a brilliant machine politician. But he was also a true believer. He saw the revolution as the great engine of social justice and mobility. It had the potential to improve living standards and to distribute these improvements equally. In time, the legacy of the revolution would deliver communism, the Soviet utopia of the future. Read more | Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War? These principles formed Khrushchev’s view of Soviet socialism. Unlike Stalin, he was never one for the recondite nuances of the revolution’s classic texts. Instead, he equated his straightforward sense of socialism with Leninism. He revered Lenin, and never departed from an intense commitment to him. But neither did Khrushchev question the economic and industrial strategy that Stalin pushed forward in the five-year plans. Khrushchev agreed that extreme measures had to be used against ‘enemies’. The stakes were so high that no chances could be taken with the success of the Bolshevik project. Khrushchev was complicit in the development of the Gulag and the prosecution of the Great Terror of 1936–38. As the leading figure in the administration of Moscow city and region, and then of Ukraine, he spoke in favour of the need to use extreme violence against enemies and he himself consigned significant numbers of people to execution. He had blood on his hands. Yet even in the 1930s, he could not stop thinking about old colleagues and decent sorts who had ended up in the ‘meat grinder’. Their ‘guilt’ made no sense to him. He feared for himself and his family. But he had to go on; political life was like a moving train from which one could not depart. Stalin’s suffocating embrace During the war, after Kyiv fell to the Nazis, Khrushchev was transferred to the military as a political commissar, serving in Stalingrad and elsewhere. When the Germans retreated, he was sent back to Kyiv. In 1949, he resumed his old job in Moscow. Stalin constantly pulled him back and forth into a suffocating embrace, sometimes humiliating him but also placing him next to Lavrenty Beria and Georgi Malenkov at the top of the Politburo. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-170987691-b52ec57-e1776154250776.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large portrait of Joseph Stalin is displayed above a stage draped with flags and curtains. Below it, Soviet officials stand and clap during a formal assembly, with military personnel visible behind them. A banner with Russian text praising Stalin hangs across the front." title="Communist dignitaries celebrate Josef Stalin’s 70th birthday at the Bolshoi Theatre, 21 December 1949. They include: Mao Zedong, Nikolai Bulganin, Stalin, Walter Ulbricht, Khrushchev, Georgi Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov. By now Stalin had promoted Khrushchev to the pinnacle of the Politburo but still subjected him to periodical humiliations (Image by Getty Images)" /> Khrushchev navigated the turbulent politics that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 to become the leading figure in a collective leadership of Bolshevik barons. His power base was not in the central government (like Malenkov) or the security services (like Beria), or the military-industrial complex, or a republic administration. It was in the party, of which he was first secretary. He played his hand well. By 1956, he was increasingly first among equals in the collective leadership. The post-Stalin period was already known as the Thaw. In 1954, Ilya Ehrenberg released a novel with that name. The book seemed to sum up the shift towards a more open culture and addressed questions about private dilemmas as well as public life. At the same time, Stalin’s cult of personality was being dismantled in an ad hoc way in many public institutions. Large numbers of prisoners were released from the camps shortly after Stalin died, while certain social improvements, notably in policy towards the collective farms, were already under way. But all of these processes were tentative, and there was no central vision that directed them. The metaphor of ‘thaw’ – the end of the Eurasian winter – seemed to make sense: heralding a new start but revealing filth beneath the melting snow; promising glorious spring, but subject to periodic re-freezes and bitter spells. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-2158738484-6c0e32f-e1776155335214.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Several people in coats and headscarves stand at a counter while a woman on the other side sorts and distributes neatly stacked folded textiles. The scene appears to take place in a busy indoor store or distribution centre." title="Women buy socks in a state-run store, Moscow, 1954. In the early years of Khrushchev’s rule, changes in social policy improved living conditions across the USSR (Image by Getty Images)" /> A terrible question As party first secretary, Khrushchev looked at Soviet politics through a party lens. Party structures, institutions, appointments and events were under his immediate control and offered a comprehensible set of approaches for him to deal with the enormous challenges and risks of post-Stalin governance. There had not been a consistent approach to post-Stalin politics and society. A guiding message was missing. And the terrible question – what had happened to all those millions of missing people, and could it happen again? – remained unanswered. Khrushchev called a Party Congress for February 1956. Congresses were the most important events in the running of the party, held once every few years. They assembled leading members from across the USSR and formalised the party’s approach for the next political cycle. It would be the 20th Congress in the party’s history; 1,349 delegates with full voting rights set off for Moscow. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-515456560-2bdfd4f-e1776154537582.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large crowd stands closely together as several men in suits smile and speak with a woman facing them. People behind them are also dressed formally, suggesting a social or official event." title="Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress with top officials including Nikolai Bulganin (second left). Despite the apparent bonhomie, Khrushchev was about to spring an enormous surprise on his colleagues (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even while they were on their way, Khrushchev was wrestling with his own demons. Like so many other people in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had family members who had disappeared into the maw of Stalinist repression. Not long after the death of his son in military action in 1943, Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law was sent to the camps and endured 13 years of incarceration and exile. The psychological and political legacies of Stalinism left Khrushchev uneasy and on edge, both as a person and as a top politician. The Presidium, as the Politburo was called between 1952 and 1966, commissioned a top-secret investigation into the Great Terror, led by the historian and senior propagandist Pyotr Pospelov. He and his team worked exhaustively through the archives, where the dreadful events were meticulously documented in file after file of denunciations, confessions, death sentences and quasi-judicial proceedings. Pospelov read out the report to the Presidium on 9 February 1956. Khrushchev, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and the rest of the collective leadership sat round the table in the Kremlin. He told them that 1,920,635 people were arrested between 1935 and 1940 for counter-revolutionary ‘crimes’ like so-called sabotage and espionage. A total of 688,503 were shot. For all his complicity in events, Khrushchev did not have a bird’s-eye view of what had happened in real time. Now he knew the extent of it. Molotov and Kaganovich were old Stalinists who still sat in the Presidium and argued that this bloodshed was necessary collateral damage for building socialism, but Khrushchev and the rest of his colleagues no longer accepted this and recognised that it was time to set a new course. Khrushchev agonised in his memoirs about what he would say at the congress, but one thing seemed certain. “At this congress we had to take leadership of the party and country,” he argued to himself. “For this we had to know exactly what had happened before and what decisions Stalin had made.” The 20th Party Congress began a few days later. Khrushchev waited until the main sessions were over and then gave a speech at an extra, closed session. The Hall of the Supreme Soviet in the Great Kremlin Palace was packed. Delegates included members of the Central Committee, top party officials and representative members from around the USSR, as well as a handful of specially invited Gulag survivors. What was about to happen? The anticipation was overwhelming. Cruel and uncouth Khrushchev came to the rostrum. He coughed, perhaps with nerves. The speech went on for four hours, but he got straight to the point. Stalin was a cruel, uncouth and essentially un-Bolshevik comrade who had created his own anti-revolutionary cult of personality. This was a diversion away from Leninism; in fact, before his death, Lenin had spoken out against Stalin and his personal flaws. Khrushchev described and condemned the Great Terror, and especially its devastating effect on the party, and blamed Stalin personally for its excesses. And he bitterly demolished what he described as Stalin’s incompetence during the Second World War, with the military errors, the terrible and unnecessary losses, and his wilful personal appropriation of the people’s victory. Yet Khrushchev glossed over or missed out many other atrocities, perhaps most egregiously the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. He drew not only an explicit contrast between Lenin, the true voice of Bolshevism, and Stalin, its betrayer; he also tried to show that where Lenin had approved of violence, it had been proportionate and in the direct service of the revolution, unlike Stalin’s unlimited, unfocused and amoral atrocities. Read more | Stalin’s famine: a brief history of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine The effect on the audience was extraordinary. Imagine: for 27 years, the cult of Stalin had accumulated and left its traces in the minds of the audience, many of whom were conformists who had been handed their careers by Stalin, or activists who were politically inspired by his ubiquitous and faux-humane messages. They all had something to lose. Top provincial officials were often desperately anxious about the risks of a sudden political change. Some of them really did have heart attacks and had to be carried out of the hall. But the more carefully they listened, the more they caught the subtext. For a start, there would be economic continuities from the Stalin era. The basic mechanisms of central planning, industrial management and collectivised agriculture would not change. Khrushchev was airing the crimes of the Stalin period, but he was pinning most of the blame for them on Stalin himself, which sounded like a let-off for the officials who had directly or indirectly condemned so many to death during the purges. And Khrushchev was saying that it wouldn’t happen again. This meant that the secret police would no longer be a threat to their personal safety or their job security. Khrushchev was offering a political deal, an ideological relaunch, a limited quest for redemption, and the possibility – if only that – of coming to terms with the past. For all its flaws, it amounted to a new revolutionary vision and was a turning point in Soviet history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BAL3387059-9eaab48-e1776154781443.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man stands at a podium with the Soviet emblem, speaking to an assembly in a large hall. Behind him, officials sit at a long bench, and above them a tall statue of Lenin is set into a wall niche." title="Khrushchev delivers his Secret Speech in a packed Hall of the Supreme Soviet. His evisceration of Stalinism triggered a number of heart attacks among his audience (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This was the Secret Speech, delivered in a closed room, out of reach of radio microphones and western observers. The plan was to give the message to Congress delegates and for them to inform the party membership and then the wider population at ‘town-hall’-style meetings. By allowing news of the condemnation of Stalin to filter out in a controlled way across the USSR and the eastern bloc, the leadership hoped to reduce the chance of unforeseen consequences and even instability. This was only partly successful. There were leaks. Major challenges to Soviet-style socialism arose in Poland and Hungary during 1956, culminating in the Hungarian Revolution and its deadly suppression. In Georgia, inside the USSR, commemorations of Stalin’s death took place in early March as they had done since 1953. Stalin was the nation’s favourite son, and before his death, when the Georgian Lavrenty Beria and others held key positions in Moscow, it had been a republic with particular privileges. As rumours about the Secret Speech swirled around the Tbilisi crowd, opposition voices emerged and protests began; it was eventually ended by force, during which at least 15 civilians were killed. Read more | Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island Meanwhile, party representatives and activists took the speech to the membership. Anna Pankratova was a leading historian, a veteran specialist in the revolutionary movement. She spoke about the Secret Speech at nine local party meetings between 20 and 23 March: 5,930 people showed up and asked 825 questions. Among many other worries, they wondered why it had taken Khrushchev so long to make the speech and why it focused so much on Stalin personally. Many of Pankratova’s interlocutors were members of the Leningrad intelligentsia. All kinds of people went to similar meetings across the USSR and had diverse responses. Some wanted more radical change; some wanted more detailed information; some were afraid; some thought it better to forget than to remember. A two-sided record The speech became the fundamental basis of the Thaw. It signalled a new relationship between the population and the government, including a tentative version of Soviet-style rights. For the rest of the Khrushchev era and the few years that followed, culture became noticeably more diverse and open. Releases from the camps continued on a large scale, and the Gulag was very significantly downgraded. There was no repeat of the Great Terror; people no longer really feared arbitrary arrest. Questions about Stalinist violence were sometimes broached in public life, providing at least some answers to victims and their families. Some of those who were innocently convicted were legally ‘rehabilitated’, though this was sadly posthumous. Accompanying this shift to a more person-centred politics and culture was a major change in social policy, which Khrushchev saw as a fulfilment of Leninism and a return to revolutionary norms. Living conditions got better thanks to a mass housing programme; cities across the USSR were transformed by the construction of five-storey blocks of separate family apartments. The pensions and benefits system was considerably expanded in 1956 and it was extended to the countryside for the first time in 1964. The length of schooling was extended. Spending on healthcare went up. Life became less pressured and risky, more stable and promising. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-2238477911-b9b5595-e1776155027766.jpg" width="619" height="412" alt="A crowd stands around a large fallen statue head that is burning from the top. The face is marked with graffiti, including “W.C.” on the forehead and other text along the side. People in coats watch the scene in an urban setting." title="A statue of Stalin lies stricken in Budapest following its destruction during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 – an unforeseen consequence of Khrushchev’s reforms (Image by Getty Images)" /> Yet the Soviet Union remained a dictatorship. People were not free to travel abroad. Political censorship persisted. Central planning reduced normal levels of consumption. The KGB was powerful. The countries of east-central Europe remained socialist ‘satellites’ against their will. And while Stalinism as a complete system was gone for good, most of those who had been responsible for putting it into practice remained in office. Khrushchev was a bifurcated politician, whose record had two sides to it. The Thaw in Soviet life that was his signal achievement was likewise complex and nuanced. But when it came to the question ‘Did Stalin betray the revolution?’, Khrushchev gave an historic response. He made an epoch-defining, big-risk, high-octane speech – one of the hinges of the whole 20th century – and then implemented a transformative sequence of reforms that sought to reposition the Soviet Union on a Leninist footing. The results were mixed, but there was no going back to Stalinism. Dr Mark B Smith teaches history at Cambridge University and is the author of Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953–91 (Allen Lane, 2026)
England's mistress: how Nell Gwyn won the heart of Charles II – and became a political powerhouse
Nell Gwyn became famous for her love affair with Charles II, and for her love of drinking, gambling and carousing. Yet, writes Sophie Shorland, this upwardly mobile celebrity was also a canny political operator who wielded substantial power in court
On a first date with the king of England, you might reasonably expect him to pay the bill. Yet Nell Gwyn’s relationship with Charles II started as it went on: unconventionally. The celebrated actress met the king for the first time in 1668 at a London playhouse, where Gwyn caught his eye from an adjacent box; according to reports, they flirted throughout the performance. Afterwards, Gwyn and her companion joined Charles and his younger brother, the Duke of York (later King James II & VII), at a hostelry. There, legend has it, once the party had eaten and drunk their fill, the landlord presented them with the tab. Upon searching his pockets, we’re told, Charles found that he had no money with him, and was forced to lean on one of the royal hangers-on to pay up. Gwyn’s reaction to this unexpected turn of events was typically droll: she joked that she had got into “the poorest company that ever [she] was in!” Across her extraordinary life, that acerbic wit never let her down. Pepys’ pin-up Nell Gwyn was, quite literally, the pin-up girl of Restoration England. Above his desk at the Admiralty, the diarist Samuel Pepys kept an engraving of the actress posing as Cupid. In it, with wings her only attire, one perfectly toned arm made an ineffectual attempt to preserve some modesty. Pepys was clearly enchanted by Gwyn – as was King Charles. Despite that inauspicious first liaison in the London tavern, the actress and the monarch embarked upon a scandalous love affair that produced two sons and set tongues wagging across the kingdom. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1751434017-f189007-e1775638623277.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A monochrome engraving shows a winged, classical figure from the waist up. The figure has curled hair, holds an arrow in one hand, and gazes slightly toward the viewer." title="An engraving of a c1672 painting depicts Nell Gwyn as Cupid. A copy of this image hung above Samuel Pepys’ desk at the Admiralty, demonstrating the renowned (and lascivious) diarist’s appreciation (Image by Getty Images)" /> That relationship – coupled with Gwyn’s beguiling looks, spellbinding stage performances and razor-sharp wit – helped cement her reputation as one of the most alluring figures of the late 17th century. Her contemporaries were beguiled by her, and historians, novelists and film-makers remain just as intrigued today. But when we look back, are we celebrating the real Neil Gwyn? Is there more to this Restoration-era socialite than meets the eye? Over the three and a half centuries since she first exploded into the public’s consciousness, Gwyn has been seen mostly as an apolitical character – one more interested in living the high life than in the affairs of state. In fact, at a time when Charles’s other mistresses were widely derided for meddling in the business of government – and spending too freely from the public finances – Gwyn’s apparent lack of interest in politics only served to supercharge her popularity. One popular verse of the time perfectly captures public sentiment: “Hard by Pall Mall, lived a wench called Nell; King Charles the Second, he kept her. She hath a trick to handle his prick, But never lays hands on his sceptre. All affairs of the state, from her soul doth she hate, And leave to the politic bitches.” If this poem is to be believed, Gwyn never tried to influence the king in the affairs of state. Yet take a closer look at her life and a different picture emerges. Nell’s early years are contested: Hereford, London and Oxford all lay claim to be her birthplace. The identity of her father also remains obscure; he may have died in debtor’s prison, or may have been an army captain who lost everything to the Civil War. Read more | Making of a monarch: how the young Charles II endured war, defeat and exile before the Restoration What we do know is that, in her youth, Nell Gwyn worked as an ‘orange wench’, selling fruit and other sweet treats (possibly alongside sexual favours) to theatregoers, before becoming one of the first actresses on the English stage. She quickly became known for her appearance, endowed as she was with luxuriant auburn hair, a fashionably long nose and a slight figure. Gwyn was also blessed with killer comedic timing and a quick wit, cracking out one-liners both on and off the stage. In John Dryden’s tragic drama Tyrannic Love, Gwyn spoke the final lines of the play as herself, struggling from her character’s deathbed to declare: “As for my epitaph when I am gone, I’ll trust no poet, but will write my own. Here Nelly lies, who, though she liv’d a slater’n, Yet dy’d a princess acting in St Cathar’n.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/0713633-c64800a-e1775638715191.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white illustration shows a street vendor in period clothing holding a shallow tray of round fruits, with a larger woven basket balanced on their head. Handwritten text above reads “fine Oranges fine Lemons.”" title="Mono PrintBefore forging a successful career on the stage, Nell Gwyn worked as an orange ‘wench’, selling fruit outside theatres (Image by Topfoto)" /> Gwyn’s magnetic presence onstage made her a star and attracted the attention of the king. Yet it was neither mere coincidence nor simply sexual attraction that triggered her affair with Charles, though her famed physical allure was certainly important. The two were introduced by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham – reputedly the richest man in England after the king. Buckingham was always scheming, and was described as a haphazard scapegrace who “could keep no secret, nor execute any design without spoiling it”. By pushing Gwyn in Charles’s direction, Buckingham’s intention was to curtail the influence at court of Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine. The voluptuous, violet-eyed Castlemaine had long been Charles’s chief mistress – and made plenty of enemies in the process. Buckingham’s plan was to replace her with Gwyn. His plan worked a treat – so much so that, in January 1668, Pepys reported that “the king did send several times for Nelly”. After being rowed up the Thames by ferrymen, Gwyn made her way up the back stairs into Charles’s private apartments in Whitehall Palace. By the spring of 1669, she was accompanying the king to the races at Newmarket, and they were seen wandering around together in old clothes, like a married couple. She also reputedly taught him how to fish, though quite where she learned the skill is a mystery. What is certain is that their relationship endured in a way that the king’s other affairs didn’t, and their first son – named Charles to make no mistake over his paternity – was born on 8 May 1670. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-463978635-7c7277f-e1775638945132.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in 17th‑ or 18th‑century dress wears a light blue gown with a low neckline, pearl jewellery, and curled hair. Behind them is a landscape on one side and rich red drapery on the other." title="Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine was Charles II’s long-standing mistress – but was edged out by Nell Gwyn after courtiers became irked by the countess’s influence over the king (Image by Getty Images)" /> Life of luxury A life of comparative privilege had begun for Gwyn. She kept an open table, and enjoyed gambling, drinking and going to the races. She was a dyed-in-the-wool socialite who embraced all of the earthly pleasures that life in the Restoration court had to offer. Hence she has mostly been seen by posterity as a good-time girl with a heart of gold. Read more | The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys Yet she also had the ear of the king, and she undoubtedly used that hotline to power to shape the course of events in the Restoration era. For example, early in her relationship with Charles, she began playing a diplomatic role, hosting the French ambassador Colbert de Croissy at her comparatively modest house off Kingsway near the City of London. Hosting ambassadors is a soft-power role typically associated with the queen – a way to be involved in diplomatic discussions and advise the king without overtly steering foreign policy. Persuading the king to commit to affairs of state wasn’t always easy. Though quick-witted and clever, Charles abhorred work, preferring to play cards and eat pigeon pie while he should have been discussing diplomacy. The king routinely brought his meetings with de Croissy to an early end so that he could take a nap. Courtiers despaired of him ever taking his job seriously. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1155867058-8f6d163-e1775638818819.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A regal figure sits on a throne wearing a jewelled crown, long curly wig, and an ermine‑lined red velvet robe. The monarch holds a golden sceptre in one hand and an orb in the other, with an ornate tapestry behind." title="Charles II, probably painted in the 1670s by John Michael Wright. Never fond of work, the king was steered into important meetings by Nell Gwyn, who was his mistress from early 1668 until his death in 1685 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Not Gwyn. She laid a wager of £100 that she could get the king to attend a meeting. Then she recruited the actor and theatre manager Thomas Killigrew. Dressed for a long pilgrimage. Killigrew burst into Charles’s closet, telling the king that he was off “to hell… to fetch back Oliver Cromwell that he may take care of the affairs of England, for his successor takes none at all”. It was a bold move, but it did move Charles to go to the meeting. Gwyn won her £100. However, her influence was soon to be curbed – by another woman. Louise de Kérouaille arrived in England in 1670, charged by French king Louis XIV to report back on Charles’s affairs, and to steer the English monarch towards policies that favoured the French. With a continental elegance and a reputation as an excellent hostess, it wasn’t long before de Kérouaille caught the English king’s eye. Yet Gwyn wasn’t about to allow her French rival to wrest away the monarch’s affections without a fight. At one riotous dinner, Nell’s old friend Buckingham pretended to be Charles while she mocked de Kérouaille’s accent, saying: “Me no bad woman. If me tout me was one bad woman, me would cut mine own trote.” Though she tried to spar with Gwyn, de Kérouaille’s tongue was never quite sharp enough: she always came out second best. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BAL5403391-1c1ea22-e1775639143886.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in elaborate 17th‑century clothing sits with one arm resting on a surface and the other holding a small black‑and‑white dog. They wear pearl jewellery and a richly detailed blue‑and‑gold gown, with architectural elements and distant figures in the background." title="Louise de Kérouaille was encouraged to start a relationship with Charles II in order to further French and Catholic interests (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> According to a (probably apocryphal) anecdote, one day in Oxford Nell’s coach was surrounded by a mob who, taking her to be de Kérouaille, angrily harangued her for her influence over the king. Sticking her head out of the coach, Gwyn twinkled: “Pray, good people, be civil: I am the Protestant whore.” (Not, in other words, the Catholic one, de Kérouaille.) The crowd blessed her and allowed her to continue on her way. Did she genuinely advocate for Protestant interests? Or were her words fired purely by a bitter personal rivalry with de Kérouaille? In November 1678, Gwyn demonstrated her allegiance to a Protestant agenda, hosting a pope-burning party at her house. At such popular pageants, effigies of the pope and other hated (usually Catholic) figures were mocked and paraded through the streets before being set alight, to great whoops of vengeful joy. Guests at Gwyn’s party taunted the likeness of the pope, who “sat in a great chair, with a red nose half a yard long, with some hundreds of boys throwing squibs [small fireworks] at it”. Gwyn also interceded effectively with the king on behalf of her friends. Among her successes was getting Buckingham released from captivity in the Tower of London after yet another of his madcap schemes backfired – in this instance, trying to force the dissolution of parliament. Controversially, the duke stayed at Gwyn’s house after his release. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period She also played a part in the fall from favour of the lord treasurer, the Earl of Danby. She and Buckingham formed a double act, Gwyn’s perfect imitation of Danby’s wife making the king laugh. As Danby’s position became more precarious, one of his supporters wrote to his father: “All this has been brewing since those entertainments at Nelly’s… and the scenes of abuse there passing on Lord Treasurer.” Danby was eventually replaced by one of Gwyn’s close friends, whose career she promoted: Laurence Hyde, a heavy drinker who “swore like a cutler”. Choppy waters Gwyn’s political interventions sometimes plunged her into dangerous waters. In 1679, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, arrived back in England from the Hague. Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, Monmouth made little secret of his desire to succeed his father to the throne. The king himself was less keen on that prospect, but he had a problem: Monmouth was not just charismatic but also a Protestant – unlike the Duke of York who, without any legitimate heirs born to Charles, was next in line. When Monmouth arrived ‘home’, he was welcomed by throngs of cheering people. And where did the wannabe king choose to stay in London? At the house of his good friend Nell Gwyn. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BAL7207607-88d96e1-e1775639274233.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person with long, dark, curly hair wears an elaborate historical outfit with a white lace collar, a deep red velvet robe, and a jeweled chain. The dark background highlights the figure’s face and clothing." title="The 1st Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, angled to take the throne – and was housed in London by Nell Gwyn (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> By then, she had become a popular symbol of anti-French, anti-Catholic sentiment, and was staunch in her advocacy for Monmouth, even as he rebelled with increasing vigour against his father’s rule. Yet her support for him ultimately proved in vain. Charles stripped him of his titles and banished him from court. In response, Monmouth doubled down, conspiring to overthrow the king. Those plans discovered, Monmouth threw himself on his father’s mercy. He would not tilt for the throne again until after Charles’s death. Any damage to her relationship with Charles didn’t prevent Gwyn from continuing her diplomatic efforts. In 1681, a Moroccan embassy arrived to negotiate control over Tangier and the release of English slaves. The embassy was headed by the dashing Mohammed ben Hadou, whose excellent manners and spirited riding in Hyde Park made him an instant celebrity. Who better to entertain him than Nell Gwyn? They passed a magnificent evening together – though, it has to be said, a rather sedate one by Restoration standards: the Moroccan embassy drank only milk and water, and resolutely resisted staring at the ladies. Aware that her popularity with the English public was based on her reputation as a royal mistress who did not meddle in politics, Gwyn was careful not to visibly overstep the mark. Yet she was a canny influencer behind the scenes, advising the king and providing a means through which others could access his ear. Not just the 17th century’s good-time girl, Nell Gwyn was a political operator with hidden depths. The common touch How an actress became the toast of the nation Nell Gwyn enjoyed extraordinary popularity during her lifetime and afterwards, remembered as a kind of people’s princess – a commoner who rose through the ranks. It helped, of course, that she represented working, Protestant England in contrast to the perceived idleness, Catholicism and profligacy of the Restoration court. Gwyn never forgot either her roots or her friends. She kept up with her fellow actors, and had her difficult, alcoholic mother come to live with her. It was partly her quick wit and lack of pretension, always acknowledging her stratospheric rise, that secured Gwyn’s popularity. But she also showed glimpses of a compassionate inner self that – despite her experience as an actress – appeared to be spontaneous and added to her ‘woman of the people’ persona. She is said to have helped persuade Charles II to found the Royal Hospital Chelsea for soldiers “broken by age and war”. An excellent tipper, she had a reputation for an open table and generous giving. As one popular satire, comparing Gwyn favourably with her French rival Louise de Kérouaille, put it: “I neither run in court nor city’s score, / I pay my debts, distribute to the poor.” In fact, Gwyn ran up plenty of debts, but it was appearance that mattered: she had a reputation as someone who did not cost the public purse too much, and who gave freely and compassionately. Following her death in 1687, Gwyn left £20 a year in her will to release debtors from prison on Christmas Day, and £50 to poor Catholics “for showing my charity to those who differ from me in religeon”. After years of taunting “the Catholic whore”, Gwyn had decided on one last magnanimous act. Even today, her legacy is evident in places sprinkled around London: the Nell Gwyn pub just off the Strand, an art deco apartment block in Chelsea, a blue plaque on her former home on Pall Mall. In her story, people could – and can still – see themselves: a commoner made good, and who made the world remember her name. Sophie Shorland is a former research fellow at the University of Warwick. Her books include Queen Catherine’s Court: Power and Rebellion in Restoration England (Atlantic, 2024) This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
What are history's biggest misconceptions? 9 experts reveal what we get wrong about the past
Our team of historians, broadcasters and authors take aim at the most egregious fallacies about the past
Ancient Athenian democracy was democratic There’s plenty to criticise about that ancient approach We wouldn’t recognise the system practised in ancient Athens as democracy in the sense we understand it today. Women did not have the vote, and the entire society depended on a massive slave population to be able to function. Yet in other ways it was also more democratic than our democracies today. Every (male) citizen took an active role in governing the city, and every major decision was taken by a vote involving every citizen who attended. An even more egregious misconception is the idea there is an unbroken link between ancient and modern democracy. Athenian democracy lasted for only around 200 years; since then, through most of the rest of antiquity, the Middle Ages and more modern historical periods, democracy has not been practised. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1155876683wbebready-ecda02a-e1775040845111.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of an ancient Greek orator standing on a raised platform, wearing a robe and laurel wreath, gesturing toward a crowd of citizens and soldiers gathered below. Classical buildings and hills appear in the background" title="Demosthenes, a defender of Athenian democracy in the fourth century BC, pictured in a c1880s illustration (Image by Getty Images)" /> In more recent times, Athenian democracy has been held up as a system to avoid rather than imitate. During debates between the founding fathers about the Constitution of the United States in the 1780s, many argued that “even if every Athenian had been a Socrates [ie very intelligent], Athenian democracy would have been little more than mob rule”. It is only very recently that we have come (again) to admire Athenian democracy, and want to link our own system of government to that ancient ideal. Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick Most people in the past had much shorter lifespans Many people died very young – but many others lived long lives On paper, this seems to be true: today, the average global life expectancy is around 72, whereas for much of the medieval and early modern periods the figure hovered around 30–35. You might think, then, that modern medicine, public health initiatives and better nutrition have all combined to help us live longer than our ancestors. In fact, though there has been a significant improvement in living conditions, the idea that there has been a corresponding increase in lifespan over the centuries is incorrect. The overall life expectancy has risen simply because more of us are living to older ages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1691539942wbebready-f6db793-e1775040973181.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A seated adult in dark clothing cradles a young child dressed in pale yellow, who leans against them as if unwell. A bowl and spoon sit on a nearby table, with a chair draped in green fabric to the right." title="A 17th-century Dutch painting depicts a mother with her sick child. Though infant mortality was high in pre-modern eras, many people who survived childhood lived long lives (Image by Getty Images)" /> It’s important to understand the difference between life expectancy and lifespan. The former is an average – so, for example, if two people are born on the same day and one lives to the age of 80 but the other gets ill and dies before their first birthday, their average life expectancy is 40. Although that is statistically correct, we should be wary of drawing conclusions about typical lifespans. Using such figures doesn’t tell us that all (or even most) people in the past lived shorter lives. For most of the medieval and early modern periods, infant mortality was high due to the prevalence of disease, the lack of vaccines and medical knowledge, poor hygiene and sanitation, and complications from childbirth. But if you made it through childhood, you had a fair chance of living for almost as long as the average person today. There are plenty of historical examples of people living well into their seventies, eighties and beyond. Elizabeth I was in her 70th year when she died, and the Roman author and scientist Pliny the Elder recorded one musician who enjoyed good health until his death at the age of 105. Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster Every war ends at a single moment The consequences of conflict can drag on for years The greatest historical misconception is that wars come to an end neatly, on a specific date, with the signing of an armistice or surrender agreement. No war in history has ever ended happily-ever-after with a sudden return to normality. The consequences of war – famine, displacement, lawlessness and political violence – often last longer than the conflict itself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-514079642wbebready-6a2479b-e1775041054396.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“A group of people gather with copies of The Washington Times, holding up front pages with bold headlines such as ‘GERMANY SURRENDERS’ and ‘WAR IS OVER,’ reacting to news of the First World War’s end" title="Jubilant Americans celebrate German defeat in 1918. As Keith Lowe points out, though, the end of a world war has never resulted in a world fully at peace (Image by Getty Images)" /> The First World War is a perfect example. In our popular imagination, especially in the west, it came to an abrupt end on 11 November 1918. But the guns did not fall silent for long. Popular revolutions soon broke out in Germany, Austria, Hungary and many other places. Turkey was consumed by ethnic and religious violence, and vast battles took place between Poland, Ukraine and the new Soviet Union. Such events created an atmosphere of chaos that lasted well into the 1920s. The same thing happened after the Second World War. Ceasefires in 1945 did not bring immediate peace. Instead, armed groups rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the defeat of Germany and Japan. Political violence became the norm, and full-blown civil wars erupted in Greece, Poland, China and Indonesia, among other places. That period of chaos lasted at least until the end of the 1940s. War is sometimes unavoidable. But if we had a better historical understanding of the long-term consequences, perhaps we would prepare a little better for the period of instability that always comes afterwards. And maybe we would be less eager to embark on war in the first place. Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017) Read more | Is the Eastern Front the forgotten theatre of World War One? History is written by the victors Voices of the defeated often resonate the loudest “History will be kind to me,” said Winston Churchill, “for I intend to write it.” Or such, at least, is the popular paraphrase of a line that Churchill trotted out on numerous occasions, always in jest. In reality, as he must have appreciated, no one gets to dictate how they are viewed by posterity. Nevertheless, the notion that ‘history is written by the victors’ is a persistent one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1175727472wbebready-4a19229-e1775041240806.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white engraving showing a hooded, monk‑like figure offering a bowl and cross to an injured man supported by another. A fourth man in a helmet and holding a spear watches beside a forest stream and small waterfall" title="Welsh leader Llywelyn ap Gruffudd dies, 1282 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Consider a few counter-examples from the broad sweep of British history. Our only narrative source for Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is Gildas, a British monk lamenting the arrival of the invaders. Similarly, when the Vikings were ravaging Europe in the ninth century, the tale of their bloody progress was recorded by their monastic victims. Even the Normans, who produced an abundance of propaganda to justify their conquest of England in 1066, did not get to control the narrative. One of the most insightful portraits of William the Conqueror is the obituary of him penned by an English monk. The king, we are told, “was stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will… In his time people suffered grievous oppression and manifold injuries.” When Edward I conquered Wales in the late 13th century, no one (insofar as we know) celebrated his victory in verse, but Welsh poets did lament the passing of his vanquished opponent, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The voices of the defeated are often the ones that resonate the loudest across the centuries. Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster Vikings drank from their enemies’ skulls Those horned helmets are hooey, too Lurid myths swirl around the Vikings: that they wore horned helmets, drank from the skulls of vanquished foes, and tortured and dispatched enemies by splaying their ribs in the gruesome ‘blood eagle’. It’s all nonsense. We can blame the 19th century for the horned helmets. When translations of the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas were published, that headwear started to sneak into the illustrations. Wagner didn’t help. In 1876, for the first performances of his Ring cycle, costume designer Carl Doepler decided that horned helmets would be just the thing. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-542363271wbebready-344c1a7-e1775041336198.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of three people dressed in Viking‑style outfits, wearing horned helmets and fur garments, each holding a spear and a decorated round shield" title="Warriors don horned helmets in a Wagner opera (Image by Getty Images)" /> The idea of drinking from the skulls of enemies comes from a misreading of an Old Norse verse. That’s easily done, because the Norse wrote fiendishly complicated poetry that was deliberately difficult to unpick. One ode, Krákumál (‘The Lay of Kraka’), features a line about heroes drinking from the “curved branches of skulls”. It’s actually a poetic reference to animal horns, but 17th-century antiquarian Ole Worm translated it as heroes quaffing “from the skulls of those they had killed”. The ‘blood eagle’ is trickier to unpick, but again Old Norse poetry might be the source. The sons of Ragnar Lodbrok (‘Hairy-Breeches’), it was written, murdered the king of Northumbria by cutting his ribs from his spine and drawing out his lungs so that they looked like gory wings. It has been argued that this is a misunderstanding rooted in knottily obscure Old Norse verse, and that no such form of torture was ever perpetrated. The moral of the story? If in doubt, blame poets and costume designers. Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands (Profile, 2024) Pompeii was ‘frozen in time’ Most citizens of the Roman town escaped a violent volcanic demise The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 didn’t happen in an instant. Nor was Pompeii buried in one swift sweep by lava. In fact, there was no lava at all. On the morning of the eruption, a thin curl of smoke rose from Vesuvius. By midday, the volcano had erupted, sending a vast column of smoke, ash and pumice 16 miles into the sky. Pumice rained onto the surrounding towns, and over the next few hours many of their inhabitants started to flee. Sometime after 7pm, the column – now too heavy to support itself – collapsed. This sent a scorching gush of pumice, gas and ash known as a pyroclastic flow hurtling towards Herculaneum. The city was buried beneath 20 metres of volcanic material. There were no survivors. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-918985082wbebready-dc62e0f-e1775041410267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two plaster casts of human bodies lie on a bed of light gravel, one smaller figure close beside a larger one, set against a stone wall" title="Casts of a mother and child lie in the ruins of Pompeii – two of an estimated 2,000 victims there (Image by Getty Images)" /> It wasn’t until 6.30am the following day that the first pyroclastic surge reached Pompeii’s northern walls, sweeping about 200 metres into the city before losing momentum. Then, between 7.30 and 8am, the column above Vesuvius collapsed again – and Pompeii was engulfed. Any people remaining in the city were killed instantly, their bodies locked in a rigid ‘boxer pose’ as their muscles contracted rapidly in the fierce heat. Though many died beneath collapsing structures or from suffocation during the first parts of the eruption, most residents escaped before the final lethal surges; the death rate in Pompeii may have been as low as 10 per cent. The eruption didn’t happen in an instant – and the destruction it wreaked took place over the course of some 24 hours. Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii Read more | Your ultimate guide to Pompeii, plus 8 fascinating facts about the ancient Roman city The North won the American Civil War White racial democracy was not displaced even after Confederate defeat Southern planters lost much when the American Civil War ended in 1865. The North’s victory in that conflict ensured that the Confederacy would never establish a global empire of cotton, and paved the way for emancipation, citizenship for freed people, and the franchise for black American men. Yet white racial democracy was not displaced, even if the slaveocracy was somewhat diminished. For the remainder of the 19th century, white people mounted deadly battles against black voters, business owners and politicians. They raged against the short-lived experiment in full democracy known as Reconstruction until they struck a deal with the federal government to end it. By 1877, the rest of the country had left black southerners and their few allies to defend democracy alone. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1329737646wbebready-3d4918b-e1775041532812.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A rectangular metal sign with white lettering on a dark background that reads ‘WAITING ROOM FOR WHITES ONLY BY ORDER OF POLICE DEPT" title="A Jim Crow-era sign enforcing racial segregation at a railway station in the US South (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even more strikingly, white southern elites won a narrative war that changed Americans’ sense of what happened. Historians call it the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’: an understanding shaped in schoolbooks, monuments and popular media that the antebellum South was a place of romance, not horror, and that there was something noble in the region’s last stand. Secessionists were understood as rebels, not traitors, and freed people as, in the words of future president Woodrow Wilson, “dusky children untimely put out of school”. “Whoever tells the best story wins,” it’s been said. The white South told such a compelling story that they secured Jim Crow segregation by 1900, bringing themselves back into the union on their own terms – and at the expense of black Americans. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University The Victorians were po-faced prudes The queen herself loved to laugh "We are not amused.” These words, supposedly uttered by Queen Victoria, have burdened the 19th century with an unfair reputation for prudishness and humourlessness. Many still characterise the Victorian era as a stiff and solemn time when fun and pleasure were suffocated under a cloud of self-discipline and respectability. This, quite frankly, is nonsense. Fun was a vital part of Victorian culture. Celebrity comedians packed music halls every night, the country’s most popular newspapers brimmed with jokes, and the saying “laugh and grow fat” – the belief that cheerfulness promoted health – was a familiar household phrase. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3321199wbebready-60feebc-e1775041641325.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person poses in a theatrical costume: a plaid jacket with large buttons and a wide collar, checkered trousers, a tall tilted hat, and exaggerated facial makeup, set against a plain background." title="Music-hall star Dan Leno poses in a ludicrously mismatched outfit c1890s, illustrating Bob Nicholson’s point that “fun was a vital part of Victorian culture” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Victoria herself was no exception. Her diaries are packed with things that made her laugh. At one dinner party, she found herself talking to an elderly admiral who bored her with a story about a damaged ship. Hoping to change the subject, she asked after his sister’s health. Mishearing her, the admiral replied: “She’ll be fine, ma’am, when we turn her over and scrape the barnacles off her bottom.” Victoria shook with uncontrollable laughter until tears ran down her face. It’s true that Victorian humour was less coarse than that of earlier generations. Jokes about sex, farts and other bodily functions fell out of favour – in respectable circles, at least – but puns became a national obsession, and the era’s comedians produced plenty of books, cartoons and one-liners that still have the power to amuse. It’s high time we stopped treating the Victorians as solemn bores, and started laughing with them instead of at them. Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University Read more | Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you The Middle Ages were dismal The Renaissance starts here I am continually astonished by how often I hear the medieval period in Europe called the ‘dark ages’. One thousand years of history cannot be dismissed so quickly. This was a period of seminal political developments – of genuine statecraft. It was a period of architectural and visual glories. It was a period of outstandingly rich intellectual achievement. It encompassed the Carolingian Renaissance in the eighth and ninth centuries; the so-called 12th-century Renaissance, another period of great cultural revival and vibrancy; and the late 14th and 15th-century Renaissance. (Indeed, we can blame those latter Renaissance thinkers for the denigration of the earlier Middle Ages: they had a vested interest in making out their immediate predecessors to have been benighted and stupidly dogmatic.) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-526750990webready-9c11477-e1775041787316.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large circular stained‑glass rose window composed of vivid blue, red, and yellow panels depicting religious figures, framed by Gothic stone tracery and pointed arches." title="he c1220 Dean’s Eye rose window of Lincoln Cathedral, a wonder of the Middle Ages (Image by Getty Images)" /> Modern intellectual approaches were developed in the 12th century, pioneered by the scholar Peter Abelard in his dialectical text Sic et non (‘Yes and no’). Abelard also wrote a text called the Ethics, which set the tone for many centuries of ethical thinking; he foregrounded the idea of intention, too, and promoted the dictum ‘Know thyself’. On a more everyday note, the Middle Ages were also not as filthy as often assumed. By the later part of the period, urban authorities in particular were deeply concerned about hygiene, and regulated extensively. The metaphor “standing on the shoulders of giants” is often attributed to Newton, but he was merely quoting a 12th-century philosopher, Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” We should, like Bernard, acknowledge our intellectual debts to our medieval predecessors. Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
From Joan of Arc to Brigitte Bardot: meet the trailblazing women who shaped French history
Katherine Pangonis speaks to Charlotte Vosper about the extraordinary women often excluded from France’s national story – and what their lives reveal about the country
Charlotte Vosper: In your book, you tell the history of France through the lives of 21 women. How did you choose who to include? Katherine Pangonis: I had this idea to revisit French history by looking at women who were not necessarily the most famous, but through whose lives you could explore pivotal moments of change in French history. I wanted to pick women whose experiences encapsulated or shed new light on the events that we think we know well, but usually through male-centric lenses. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the women who played roles in great moments of change in French history weren’t just footnotes or exceptions, but that their lives actively shaped politics, culture, religion and the French identity over centuries. By following their lives, I hope I can help the reader to see the history of France a bit differently. That was my key mission when selecting the women for the book. You suggest women have been systematically excluded from the national narrative of French history. Can you expand on this? I think it’s a combination of both deliberate and inadvertent exclusion from the French national narrative. Really, this links to a bigger question about the representation of women in history. In the written historical record, the lack of female representation comes down to the basic fact that throughout most of history the majority of the population were illiterate, and secondly, that the small number of the population that were educated in reading and writing, tended to be male. Today, while women aren’t totally erased from the French historical narrative, there is a lack of information about them. This book started with my long walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, where there are 20 statues of the queens and illustrious women of France. We see these women’s faces and their historical costumes, but none of the statues have any information about women’s lives attached to them. This is often the case in museums, too. One of my favourite museums is the Musée Carnavalet, which looks at the history of Paris from its early origins to the modern day. It’s an excellent museum, but the roles of women just aren’t highlighted enough. For example, they have a room about the Enlightenment which includes a desk belonging to Voltaire, a key thinker from the period. Near the desk, a portrait of Émilie Du Châtelet hangs on the wall. Du Châtelet was a fantastic mathematician in her own right and she contributed hugely to Voltaire’s work. But there is no information about her in the museum. In many cases, I think this lack of recognition comes from big institutions’ reluctance to go below the surface of existing, widely available information. This is in the process of changing though. There’s a movement among historians to redress the balance, and I would like my book to contribute to that. Read more | Medieval influencers: 4 women who brought change to the Middle Ages I would like to zone in on some of the women in your book. Let’s start with Christine de Pizan. What can you tell us about her? De Pizan was one of the first women known to make a living from her writing. She was born in Venice around 1364 and moved to France when her highly educated father began work at Charles V’s court as an astrologer. Her father made a deliberate effort to educate her, beyond what was expected at the time. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1425784369webready-56362d6-e1774964759865.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval manuscript scene shows crowned and veiled women studying around a table with books and instruments, while two others build a white‑brick wall with mortar." title="A miniature from Le Livre de la Cité des Dames. In this landmark 15th-century book, Christine de Pizan imagines an allegorical city of refuge whose walls are built from the achievements of women, ranging from warriors to artists to saints (Image by Getty Images)" /> At 15, Christine married a 26-year-old man in what seems to have been a real love match. They lived together and had children, but when he died in 1389, de Pizan was left a young widow. Suddenly, she found herself as the only breadwinner, with small children and an aging mother to look after. In response, she dedicated herself to building a career as a writer, creating these beautiful and painstakingly handwritten manuscripts. At the French court she was well positioned to find wealthy patrons to sell her works to, and so she managed to support her children with her writing, earning enough to educate them and broker them good marriages. De Pizan left behind an impressive surviving body of work, which is why researching her was so rewarding for me. She wrote about other women and elevated the female artists who illustrated her works, and in this sense, we can call her a protofeminist. She really was a fantastic figure. So you think that we can read modern identities, such as de Pizan being a ‘protofeminist’, back into the past? We can definitely see the beginnings of modern ideas in earlier thinking. While there are dramatic differences between the moral frameworks of different time periods, there’s a huge amount of shared experience throughout history. Philosophical, emotional and spiritual threads link us with the people that came before us. Projecting modern values onto the past is risky, but there are connections through time. Some of what Christine de Pizan wrote about women is problematic by modern feminist standards, like the way she writes about sex workers. While she was progressive for her day, she is not progressive enough to be called a ‘good feminist’ in the 21st century. Nevertheless, I think her work did lay the foundations of modern feminism to an extent. She built a career for herself and wrote tracts defending women against critical stereotypes. In this, we can see her as a key figure in the very early phases of the feminist movement, even if her personal values didn’t align with modern feminist ones. Read more | Joséphine de Beauharnais: how Napoleon's muse became empress of France De Pizan’s historical significance may be evident but is the influence on French history of the other women in your book as tangible? Soft power plays a critical role throughout the book. I was motivated by two considerations when selecting people to write about. I wanted to choose women who were active political agents, and in that category I would include de Pizan. I’d also include Louise Michel, an incredible activist during the Paris Commune who is often hailed as the mother of anarchy, and of course Olympe de Gouges, a woman who was pro-revolution but ended up on the block of the guillotine herself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-89856741webready-c1fb3a9-e1774965105277.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white studio photograph of a person with short, wavy hair, dressed in a dark garment with a patterned collar and a tied scarf at the neck, posed against a plain backdrop." title="The feminist, anarchist and social activist Louise Michel (1830–1905) (Image by Getty Images)" /> And yet, beyond these women, I’ve also included those whose historical influence was less tangible, and whose lives shed light on the less well-known parts of French history. In that category, I would include St Balthild of Chelles, a Frankish queen during the Dark Ages who set the stage for later powerful queens like Eleanor of Aquitaine. I’d also put Béatrice de Planisolles – a 13th-century noblewoman who was subjected to the Cathar inquisition – in that category. She wasn’t particularly powerful or wealthy, but she left behind these amazing inquisition records about how she lived her life and what she thought and felt. Then, of course, there was the Empress Joséphine Bonaparte, the wife of Napoleon. Most of her power came through her influence as a cultural icon and her profound influence on her husband. Other women who follow in this vein include the painter Berthe Morisot, who changed how women’s lives were viewed in the arts, and the singer Édith Piaf, who wrote about love, tragedy and emotional trauma. There is a soft and artistic power that reverberates from these women throughout history, and I’ve tried to capture that in the book as well. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/hip2684290webready-bace3df-e1774965238511.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A formal painted portrait of a woman wearing a jeweled tiara and an embroidered white gown, her right hand placed on a crown set on a richly decorated cushion, with a throne and drapery behind her." title="Joséphine (1763–1814), the empress of France and wife of Napoleon Bonaparte (Image by Topfoto)" /> As well as giving due attention to female power and influence, it’s also important to recognise women with more complex legacies. How did you assess their historical impact and balance that with the more troubling aspects of their life stories? That’s a really interesting question. While, as I’ve said already, I think projecting moral values onto figures of the past is tricky and not particularly rewarding, in the case of Coco Chanel, I think we can view her with our modern value systems in mind. Chanel died in the mid-20th century, and while there have been seismic societal changes between then and now, she is not so far removed from us that we should play down her complex legacy by saying she lived in a different time. Chanel has been accused of being a Nazi sympathiser. She stayed in Paris during the German occupation, lived in a lavish suite at the Ritz with her lover (who was a Nazi intelligence officer), and she offered up her services as a spy on behalf of the Nazi regime. Yes, she liberated women from corsets, modernised how women dress, and made women’s fashion more comfortable and more practical. But while this is iconic, we cannot divorce her influence on fashion from the fact that her personal conduct was terrible. Some people would argue that the punishment of French women who had Nazi lovers during the occupation was too harsh: their heads were shaved, they were whipped, and they were shamed terribly. In some cases, it was arguably justified; in others – such as poor women who had no one else to protect them – perhaps not. But I’d argue that Chanel did have choices. Women like the dancer Josephine Baker, who was in Paris during the war and offers a direct parallel, offered her services to the French Resistance at great personal risk and to help Jewish families. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1277359054-2webready-35a4f72-e1774968738135.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photo of a person in a dark jacket, light blouse, and hat with a brooch, leaning on a table with their head resting on one arm." title="The designer Coco Chanel, pictured in 1954, may have modernised fashion, but she had ties to the Nazis (Image by Getty Images)" /> Certainly, the modern fashion house is far removed from the original woman, and you can love Chanel designs, but her Nazi sympathies are a part of Coco’s story which it’s important to fully acknowledge. It was also difficult to navigate my inclusion of the actor, singer and model Brigitte Bardot in the book. She was an enduring icon of French culture but also had problematic views. I had to tread a fine line when evaluating how to acknowledge her iconic status, while highlighting that she is not necessarily a woman we should always look up to. In her early career, Bardot’s acting roles turned her into a liberating symbol of female sexuality, and she promoted the free expression of women’s sexual desires. But when she stepped away from the spotlight at the age of 39 and dedicated herself to animal rights activism, she used that cause to criticise religious groups and endorse racial prejudice. On this basis, she was fined for hate speech. I included her as the last woman in my book because I think her public image reflects the divisions in modern France. It is a deeply divided country. Vast waves of the population now vote for far-right parties and French citizens violently disagree with each other. This is part of a wider political trend in Europe, and I think Bardot represents this divisive landscape. Do you think the extraordinary women you write about can help us understand the lives of ordinary women in the past? I think we can certainly use the women in the book to understand the struggles of ordinary women. A good example is George Sand, the 19th-century writer who begged her mother for them to leave their aristocratic family and run away together. Sand wanted to start a hat shop, but her mother refused, telling Sand it would be impossible. She opened Sand’s eyes to just how dangerous and precarious life was for women without money and protection. In this moment, we see the shattering of Sand’s illusion that anything is possible, a testament to just how difficult life was for ordinary women in France over the centuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/rv52986-1webready-380713e-e1774968581596.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A shoulder‑length painted portrait of a person with dark, wavy hair decorated with red and white flowers, shown against a muted brown background." title="An 1837 oil portrait of the prolific and popular 19th-century French novelist George Sand (Image by Topfoto)" /> Another example is Béatrice de Planisolles. She was married off at a young age to an older man, raped by another, and suffered an attempted rape later in her life. De Planisolles experienced horrible things at so many points in her life, just like the other women in my book. Joan of Arc and Olympe de Gouges were executed. Brigitte Bardot suffered depression and was suicidal at points in her life. Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian militant, was also subjected to rape and sexual abuse. These are extreme cases, but they draw attention to the deep-seated misogyny and racial prejudice that has existed in French society for a very long time. Read more | “In times of political volatility, it’s more vital than ever that we tell women’s stories” | 3 historians on the state of women's history These were women who have arguably led successful and, in some cases, charmed lives, but they have also all been subjected to powerlessness and oppression. This book offers windows into lots of different women’s lives, and together they speak to the ubiquitous issues that women have faced. Whether or not these women’s lives give us insight into the experiences of ordinary women, they show us the pervasive challenges and threats that women have faced throughout history. These issues exist today, and while many women today live freer lives than they would have done a hundred years ago, there is still work to be done. Do any continuities or common experiences unite the women in your book? On the one hand, we might ask what relationship could there really be between St Balthild, the Anglo-Saxon slave girl who was trafficked from Britain to the Kingdom of the Franks and married the king, and Brigitte Bardot, the modern screen icon? But, on the other hand, I see huge points of connection. Most of the women in this book are self-made and they did not follow the paths laid out for them at birth. No one would have expected St Balthild to become Queen of the Franks, or Christine de Pizan to generate her own income from writing, or Joan of Arc to lead a French army. The wealthy, aristocratic George Sand became a trouser-wearing cigar-smoking linchpin of the Parisian literary scene, and in this, she controlled her own destiny. Simone Veil survived the Holocaust to become a leading woman in French and European politics. The women in my book were trailblazers, and that’s the thread linking them. Whether they were heroines or villains or something in between, they all managed to take control of their lives and position themselves as active agents in their own eras. I think that’s amazing. What do you hope will come out of your female-focused history of France? I hope this book will introduce readers to some women who perhaps they hadn’t heard of before. People will probably have heard of Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Brigitte Bardot. But I’m not sure how many of my readers will know about Louise Michel, Christine de Pizan, Djamila Boupacha or St Balthilde of Chelles. And so I hope that my book can plant seeds in readers’ minds. It is by no means a comprehensive work on the roles of women in French history, nor is it an in-depth academic work, but I hope that the book will whet readers’ appetites, pique their interests, and show them that there is much more to French history than they might have originally thought. Katherine Pangonis is a writer whose work focuses on the Middle East and Mediterranean regions, and the interactions between east and west. Her books include Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021) This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
The Victorians were facing a population crisis, until this ‘obscene’ invention turned out to be the solution
In the first half of the 19th century, England’s population doubled. With many families struggling to survive, the picture had to change – and the solution came in an innovative treatment of one material: rubber. But as the question of ‘respectable’ reproduction emerged, Ruth Goodman explains how the invention also widened an already broad class divide
The air in Victorian London was thick with smog. In the narrow streets of the rapidly industrialising city, where the city’s poorest families lived cheek by jowl, every child born stretched meagre resources thinner still. For those in the working class, wages were uncertain and the cost of living presented constant challenges. Yet, despite the hardship, children kept coming – one after another, year after year. With most families lacking access to contraception, there was no realistic alternative. Big families: the Victorian ideal? “One of the things that we all think we know about Victorian families was that they all had huge numbers of children”, explains historian Ruth Goodman in her HistoryExtra Academy series on Victorian Life. This is true: between 1800 and 1850, England’s population had doubled, and by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, families across the social spectrum were getting bigger. Victoria herself had nine children with her husband, Prince Albert, providing an example for others to follow. But outside of the royal family, this birth rate boom placed huge pressure on the resources of families who were scraping by on meagre livings amid the industrial revolution. But as the century progressed the image of the archetypal Victorian family – respectable, hardworking and moral – began to change. Now, smaller, controlled families were becoming the ideal. This had a noticeable effect on the population. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-464466975-aca8503-e1775055434278.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful Victorian pop‑up illustration opens to reveal Queen Victoria seated with a child while Prince Albert plays on the floor with two others in an ornate domestic interior." title="A c1845 depiction of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at home, playing with their children. The royal couple and their nine offspring were seen as the perfect example of a Victorian family (Image by Getty Images)" /> “From the 1880s, you can actually see the effects of contraception turning up in family size,” Goodman says. “In the census and the records, you can see that middle class families are getting smaller.” Read more | Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you Early Victorian contraception This was largely down to new discussions about family limitations. Shrouded in euphemism, the understanding of sex and how to prevent pregnancy was starting to be framed as a health concern. Goodman explains how it was often covered by the phrase: “Being kind to your wife”. Framing contraception in this way placed the onus on parents to prevent excessive numbers of children for their own good. The idea was that a respectable family wouldn’t have more children than they could feed, and a decent father would ensure his children had a mother to look after them. “Quiet discussions are had within certain groups of society about [not letting] your wife have too many children,” says Goodman. One argument was that “it’s not healthy for her, she should be around in good health to bring up the children you already have.” What contraception was available? In today’s world, there’s an array of accessible contraception. In the Victorian era, the options were more limited. However, there was one development that changed the game: the vulcanisation of rubber. Vulcanisation – the process of improving the durability and pliability – of rubber was patented by British inventor Thomas Hancock in November 1843 and became more widespread in the mid-to-late 19th century. The progress and innovation that characterised the Industrial Revolution helped accelerate its commercial success – and one of its most practical uses was for condoms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-90732016-2629d99-e1775055647469.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="A circular relief sculpture shows a man in formal 19th‑century clothing, with detailed facial features and visible surface cracks." title="A medallion portrait of Thomas Hancock, who obtained the first British patent for vulcanised rubber in 1843 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Condoms in some form had been available for centuries. They had variably been made from sheep guts, linen or other materials – intact condoms made from animal membrane dating to the 1640s were discovered at Dudley Castle – and were almost exclusively used for preventing the spread of venereal disease. The vulcanisation process made rubber “flexible and soft” says Goodman, “so then condoms became made of a softer, more cleanable material.” Read more | From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys The introduction of cleanable, reusable rubber condoms in 1855 was revolutionary – and people started to see the possibilities for using condoms in family planning too. Vulcanised rubber also led to the creation of the female cap – a forerunner to diaphragms and cervical caps – which, as Goodman states, “made it possible for a woman to begin to take control of her own fertility”. Due to the hierarchical ‘male breadwinner’ structure of Victorian families, the reality was that decisions regarding reproduction, or lack thereof, were still primarily made by men. However, this development in female contraception did allow women a little more autonomy over their bodies and futures. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-90763429-9b45b35-e1775056110601.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A small, rounded brown object resembling a bowler hat sits on a dark surface, with worn texture and the words “Racial Trade Mark” printed in white on the top." title="A cervical cap, c1920s. The introduction of this contraception gave women a degree of power over their own fertility (Image by Getty Images)" /> A mirror of the class divide Despite the incredible innovations, access to these new methods of contraception was far from equal. “Doctors found their way to manage their own families”, explains Goodman, “but they were not keen on passing that information on to the working classes.” While there was a widespread belief in the need to reduce family sizes, many of those in power tried to stop it. Attempts to make contraceptive advice more accessible through pamphlets were often unsuccessful as it was “decided that these were obscene publications”. Ideas of propriety and morality – as well as objections from the Catholic Church to any ‘unnatural’ birth control – prevented access to communication about sex in any straightforward terms, and in turn, limited people’s understanding of it. In 1877, The Fruits of Philosophy (an 1832 book that advocated for birth control) was the subject of a sensational obscenity trial in London. Activist Annie Besant stood in her own defence, dubbed a “filthy woman” for selling it. As Michael Meyer explained on a previous episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “[the jury decided it was a] dirty, filthy book, [but] absolved the defendants of any malicious intent in publishing it”. Regardless of intent, Besant and her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh were found guilty under the Obscene Publications Act 1857. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all Later, their convictions were overturned, and both continued to campaign, with Besant publishing her own birth control pamphlet, The Law of Population. The problem with The Fruits of Philosophy wasn’t its contents – the information inside was nothing that Victorian medical professionals didn’t already know – but that it was being sold at a low enough price for the average person to buy it. The middle classes believed that the pressure of rising population numbers forced the working classes (who they presumed were naturally lethargic) to work harder. This prejudiced – and incorrect – assumption about the nature of working-class people led to deliberate limitations on their access to contraceptive information. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3089859-b6a0f97-e1775056364693.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white historical photo shows two women, a man, and three children standing outside a small shop with jars and baskets visible inside." title="Impoverished people gather in front of a rag shop, c1877. The working classes faced many hardships – some of which were exacerbated by their lack of access to contraception (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even with these rather aggressive attempts to prevent contraceptive advice from being disseminated, the knowledge did spread. Throughout the later years of the 19th century and into the 20th, medical pamphlets, marital guides and private consultations offered methods to regulate conception. For those who could afford discretion and access to physicians, family planning became a means of greater control over their future. For those who couldn’t afford it, though, nothing much changed. In Victorian England, birth control was a mirror of the class divide. It revealed who had enough money to dictate the size of their family, and who had no such luxury.
I wrote a letter to the world's most famous terrorist – and nothing could have prepared me for his reply
In December 1975, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – better known as Carlos the Jackal – attacked the headquarters of a global oil organisation in Vienna. Jason Burke recounts the story of the incident, and reveals how his efforts to interview the terrorist helped solve a 50-year-old mystery
About half an hour after opening the letter sent to me by one of the most notorious terrorists of all time, I realised that not only did it contain a note offering “revolutionary greetings”, but that it would lead to the solution of a decades-old mystery. It was the summer of 2023, and for months I had been trying to contact Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. While researching my book, a narrative history of 1970s terrorism entitled The Revolutionists, I had already spoken to several of those who had bombed, hijacked and shot their way through the decade, but Ramírez Sánchez was the most iconic figure of these years. Arguably the world’s first real ‘celebrity terrorist’, Ramírez Sánchez was responsible for around a dozen major attacks in western Europe between 1973 and 1983. But despite the many articles, books and films about him, there was still much about his career of deadly violence that was unknown. As such, the letter on my doormat marked a significant breakthrough. From Caracas to Paris It had been easy to locate Ramírez Sánchez, who by that point had been incarcerated for nearly 30 years. Captured by the French intelligence service while undergoing minor surgery in Sudan in 1994, he had been convicted of multiple terrorist offences and held in several different prisons across France. Now locked away in a high-security facility in Fresnes, about 20 miles south of Paris, he was allowed a small number of visitors. To be among them, however, I needed an invitation. As a first step, I got a message to him via an intermediary to establish my bona fides. I then wrote directly, explaining my interest in hearing his own version of events. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/9-GettyImages-115106383-1d24d91-e1774617817390.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A multi‑storey brick complex with red‑tiled roofs and uniform tall windows fills the foreground. The older industrial‑style buildings sit within a townscape of smaller houses, trees, and a few commercial structures, including one with a visible shop sign." title="An aerial view of Fresnes Prison in Val-de-Marne – one of several French facilities in which Ramírez Sánchez has been held over the past three decades (Image by Getty Images)" /> Thanks to a large body of existing literature – declassified diplomatic cables, leaked documents and interviews with spies, officials and others – I had already learned a lot about the man from my research. For example, I found that he had not been a precociously young leftwing activist in Venezuela in the 1950s, as often claimed, but a timid and chubby teenager who steered clear of the street politics of his hometown, Caracas. In London in the 1960s, living with his mother and younger brother after his parents’ divorce, his tastes tended more towards Napoleon brandy, tailored suits and sleazy West End clubs than protests and sit-ins. In fact, his journey into violence appeared to have been motivated more by megalomania than Marxism. When sent to Moscow to study for an undergraduate degree by his leftwing lawyer father, Ramírez Sánchez was noticed not for his commitment to ideology, but to what the Soviet capital offered by way of nightlife. If, in 1970, he had made a trip to Jordan to find Palestinian factions dedicated to what they called the “armed struggle” against Israel, his claims to have fought against government forces in the virtual civil war there were exaggerated to say the least. It became apparent, too, that the idea he had been recruited by the KGB was probably just Cold War propaganda. One fact I dug out was the origin of his famous soubriquet: Carlos the Jackal. This was invented by British journalists in the summer of 1975, shortly after he had killed two French policemen, seriously injured a third, and then executed his superior in the breakaway Palestinian faction he had joined, known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-XO). All three murders had taken place within the space of a minute inside a small apartment on Paris’s Left Bank. First, French investigators had found a false passport in the name of ‘Carlos Martinez’ at the apartment of a girlfriend. Then, reporters spotted a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal in the London home of another lover, a Basque waitress. The false ID and the book were swiftly combined, and a thousand headlines followed. Read more | The JFK assassination attempt you’ve never heard of Terror in Vienna In the letter that dropped through my door that summer morning, Ramírez Sánchez expressed his delight at my intended visit. Sadly, this delight was not shared by French authorities, who blocked my request for an in-person meeting but did allow me to send a series of letters. Though he avoided answering my pointed enquiries about his misdeeds, he posted me dozens of printed and photocopied documents. These described his youth and the treble murder in Paris, before going into considerable detail about the attack that earned him global infamy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/IMG2705-62cdd3a-e1774619170787.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A collection of printed and handwritten documents lies spread out on a surface, many showing the name Ilich Ramírez Sánchez along with numbers and institutional headings. Some pages are typed, others handwritten in French." title="Although the French authorities denied his request for an in-person interview, author Jason Burke received numerous documents from Ramírez Sánchez via post (Image by Jason Burke)" /> The plan had been put together in the early autumn of 1975. Ramírez Sánchez was to lead a team from the PFLP-XO and a West German extremist group called the Revolutionary Cells in an attack on a meeting of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at its headquarters in Vienna. They would seize the high-ranking ministers due to attend, demand a plane from the Austrian authorities, and then fly around the Middle East, releasing the hostages one by one at the airports of their respective capital cities. Two would not be freed: instead, the ministers from Saudi Arabia and Iran would be shot dead. The date of the attack, 21 December 1975, was a Sunday. The streets of Vienna were quiet, the air was chilly under a clear blue sky, and carols piped over the speakers of the Christmas Market opposite OPEC’s modern, seven-storey headquarters on Ringstrasse. The attackers arrived at their target at around 11am, rushed through the unguarded entrance of the building, and made their way up to the main meeting room on the first floor. Ramírez Sánchez then fired five shots, shouting: “Don’t move… I am the famous Carlos. You may have heard of me.” There was little resistance. Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, the only female member of the team, shot dead a bodyguard of the Iraqi oil minister, before killing a plain-clothes policeman as he tried to surrender. Ramírez Sánchez then killed a Libyan economist, and explosives were wired around the building. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-GettyImages-541472303-0c984ab-e1774618111712.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows a person with curly dark hair wearing large, thick‑rimmed glasses and a collared shirt, photographed straight on against a plain background." title="One of Ramírez Sánchez’s accomplices, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, killed two men during the OPEC siege. Two years later, she was arrested after shooting two border guards in Switzerland and was sentenced to 15 years in prison (Image by Getty Images)" /> Once he was done, Ramírez Sánchez relaxed. He distributed cigarettes, chatted with his 60-plus hostages (conversing in English, Spanish and French), and ordered food from the local Hilton. Ham sandwiches – which any Muslim captives would not eat – were angrily sent back. When one of the Palestinian gunmen struggled to adjust the explosives, Ramírez Sánchez quipped, “Oh dear, I’ve told him a thousand times how to do it, and he still can’t get it right”. Similarly, when an OPEC driver tried to persuade him to free the female hostages, claiming they “might get hysterical”, Ramirez demurred, pointing to Kröcher-Tiedemann. Three unanswered questions Early the next morning, a bus arrived to take the hostages and their captors to Vienna airport, where a fully fuelled aircraft had been readied as Ramírez Sánchez had requested. He ordered the plane to fly first to Algiers, where a handful of the captives were released. The next destination was Tripoli, where Ramírez Sánchez hoped to obtain a bigger aircraft with enough range to fly around the Middle East. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-GettyImages-515113970-52211b8-e1774618468264.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a snowy airfield where several people stand between a bus and the tail section of an aircraft marked “OE‑LDB.” One person appears to be walking toward or boarding the plane, with snow‑covered ground and distant trees in the background." title="The OPEC attackers, including Ramírez Sánchez (thought to be the figure on the left, next to the bus), board the aircraft they had requested at Vienna airport. They planned to fly first to Algiers, before transferring to a larger plane in Tripoli (Image by Getty Images)" /> But he was to be disappointed. In the Libyan capital, there was a frosty reception for the angry, despondent and exhausted terrorists. No one expected them, and not a single person – even in this supposedly ‘revolutionary’ state – wanted to help. It was clear there would be no new plane. The only option was to return to Algiers, where Ramírez Sánchez was presented with an ultimatum by local authorities: he could carry out the plan to shoot the Saudi and Iranian ministers (and take his chances with Algerian security forces afterwards), or accept the $20m being offered by the Saudi and Iranian governments as ransom for the two men. Read more | How Britain stirred the cauldron of conflict in Palestine Amid stormy scenes, tears and obscenities, Ramírez Sánchez told his team that the time had come to end their escapade. A few hours later he was on his way to a five-star hotel in Algiers, thence to a luxurious government guesthouse for a few weeks’ rest and eventually back to the PFLP-XO’s base in Aden. Over the next two decades, Ramirez Sanchez would operate from bases in Baghdad, Prague, Budapest and Damascus. While some attacks were simply motivated by personal vendettas, many were commissioned by powerful patrons, including Gaddafi. Eventually, ‘Carlos the Jackal’ would become a fugitive himself, ending up in Khartoum, where the French found him. Though I had spent months investigating this whole episode, three mysteries remained unsolved. Firstly, who commissioned the attack on OPEC? Secondly, what happened to the $20m ransom payment? Finally, how had Ramírez Sánchez escaped punishment by the PFLP-XO for his failures? My correspondence with the then 74-year-old prisoner resolved the first of these questions. Ramírez Sánchez’s account unequivocally named Libya’s president, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, as the man responsible for the OPEC attack. This made sense. The mercurial Libyan leader had the means – and the motive – to embarrass pro-western Arab countries and hike the price of oil, which would boost his income. Furthermore, I had already seen testimony that a Libyan diplomat had provided weapons to the assault team in Vienna, evidence of previous Libyan support for such violence, and multiple reports of Ramírez Sánchez cursing Gaddafi as “impossible to work with” when he realised that, rather than delivering the vital new plane as presumably agreed, the Libyan leader had simply disappeared into the desert. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-GettyImages-591708114-8a4a827-e1774618771964.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person wearing glasses and a collared shirt stands at a podium, speaking into two microphones and gesturing with both hands. The background is plain and dark, drawing focus to the speaker." title="According to Ramírez Sánchez, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi – seen here in 1973 – was the instigator of the OPEC attack (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fame as a weapon The whereabouts of the $20m cash remained unresolved, however. It is possible that Ramírez Sánchez kept it, as some veterans of the PFLP-XO suggested to me when I tracked them down. But I found no proof, and the alleged thief himself did not respond to my questions on the matter. There is some reliable documentary evidence, too, that only Saudi Arabia actually paid up and that these funds were kept by the Algerians – the designated intermediary – as ‘compensation’ for their trouble. And why wasn’t Ramírez Sánchez shot by his comrades? Either after killing a respected member of the PFLP-XO, or after the debacle of the OPEC raid itself? Here, the correspondence offered an important and unsolicited insight. Much of what this most famous of terrorists sent to me consisted of press cuttings. These said nothing new, but confirmed something I had long suspected: that Ramírez Sánchez’s greatest talent was not as a terrorist, but as a self-publicist. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-GettyImages-652492568-6c4d73d-e1774618878699.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Several uniformed officers wearing dark clothing, bulletproof vests, and gold‑trimmed hats hold firearms while standing near a stone archway. A dark van with a yellow licence plate is parked behind them on the paved street." title="French police officers guard a van carrying Ramírez Sánchez ahead of a hearing in Paris, 1995. The terrorist only avoided being murdered by his former comrades because of his celebrity, says Jason Burke (Image by Getty Images)" /> If most of his attacks failed to attain their objectives, this did not matter. They all helped construct his legend, and this fame made it impossible for his outraged ‘comrades’ to consign this hero of their cause to a shallow grave in a Middle Eastern desert. It also convinced Gaddafi and other sponsors to pay Ramírez Sánchez tens of millions of dollars to carry out violent new operations in western Europe, and eventually persuaded several eastern European regimes to offer him a base in their own countries as well. The greatest weapon Ramírez Sánchez possessed, I realised, was not his Tokarev pistol or total unconcern for the suffering of others – and nor was it his undoubted ability to manipulate and charm. Rather, it was his celebrity, in which western governments and media were to some extent complicit. It was this, above all, that had allowed him to continue his career of violence at great cost to many hundreds of innocent people. Memories of his violence may have faded, but the morbid fascination with Carlos the Jackal – and sometimes other terrorists too – remains. Jason Burke is the international security correspondent for The Guardian. His latest book, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s (Vintage, 2025), was shortlisted for the 2025 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Maduro, Castro and the War on Drugs: Latin America's troubled ties with the US
Following the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by American forces, and suggestions that Washington might also target Cuba or Colombia, Danny Bird spoke to Greg Grandin about the history of US engagement with Latin America
Danny Bird: How have US views of Latin America changed over time? Greg Grandin: When the United States first emerged, what was then known as ‘Spanish America’ was part of the Spanish empire. Early US leaders therefore viewed the region through the lens of imperial geopolitics rather than as a collection of future sovereign republics. Figures such as [third president] Thomas Jefferson saw Spain as a declining empire that would fragment slowly – to the benefit of the US, which could absorb parts of its territory over time. That is largely what happened. Initially, US engagement was with Spain as an empire, not with Latin America as an independent entity. By 1823, around the time of the Monroe Doctrine [asserting the primacy of US interest in the western hemisphere], it had become clear that Spanish America was winning its wars of independence. Compared with the American Revolution, these conflicts were longer, more violent and far more destructive, unfolding across multiple theatres: Mexico; northern South America under Simón Bolívar; and the southern cone [Argentina, Uruguay and Chile]. By then, Mexico was independent, Colombia was close, and the imperial order was collapsing. At that moment, the US began to shift from dealing with a disintegrating empire to engaging with newly formed nations. In many ways, Spanish America (still not called ‘Latin America’ at that point) marked the United States’ entry into international diplomacy, because it was now required to conduct relations with other nation states within the western hemisphere. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-96744464webready-f94ecd2-e1774614501628.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A political cartoon showing Uncle Sam as a large rooster guarding a group of smaller chickens labeled with Latin American countries, while European nations sit confined in a coop marked “European Coop” under a sign reading “Monroe Doctrine" title="Chickens representing Latin American countries run free around a rooster, ‘Uncle Sam’, while Europe is cooped up in a 1901 cartoon, suggesting the benefits of the US Monroe Doctrine to its neighbours (Image by Getty Images)" /> What methods has Washington used to impose its will on this region – military or otherwise? One of the earliest coups supported by the United States took place in Mexico in the 1820s. It was orchestrated by the US diplomat Joel Poinsett – best known for introducing the poinsettia to the US – who recognised that Britain was exerting influence in Mexico through Scottish Rite Freemason lodges. In response, Poinsett organised a network of York Rite lodges aligned with American interests. These networks played a central role in a coup that brought to power a government more favourable to the United States. This episode amounted to an early form of US-backed regime change. Such interventions would become a recurring method through which the US projected its power abroad. Alongside covert political influence, it also relied on naval force. American gunboats operated along the Atlantic coast of Brazil and up the Paraná and Amazon rivers, pressuring states such as Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina into accepting free-trade treaties. And in Nicaragua in 1854, a US gunboat destroyed the port of Greytown. Read more | Is this the secret to understanding US foreign policy? How a powerful doctrine from 1823 reshaped America When did US corporations start to wield influence in Latin America? Violence in the region was tied to rivalry between British and American interests over transit routes across Central America, which were crucial after the California Gold Rush began. Many migrants travelled through Panama [where Britain had influence] or Nicaragua, making control of these routes strategically vital. Railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt was a central figure in these struggles, working to counter British influence in the region. This context also produced figures such as William Walker, a Tennessee mercenary who seized control of Nicaragua in the 1850s and declared himself president. He reinstated slavery, despite its abolition there three decades earlier, and aligned himself with Southern slaveholding interests. Before the American Civil War, much of US foreign policy was dominated by Southern states, whose priorities included defending slavery where it still existed [in places such as Brazil and Peru] and expanding it if possible. These priorities drove aggressive US policy towards Latin America. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-517478298webready-1ad5353-e1774614691603.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving of a young man in a black suit with a high white collar and black bow tie. He has combed over hair and is looking seriously at the viewer" title="American mercenary William Walker, who invaded Nicaragua and tried to reintroduce slavery there (Image by Getty Images)" /> After the Civil War, slavery was abolished and Republicans took control of the foreign policy apparatus. At that point, corporate interests became central to US engagement with the region. Mexico, in particular, became what we would now call the United States’ first nation-building project. Capital from Boston, Philadelphia and New York flooded into the country, reshaping its economy around agricultural and mineral exports. US businesses took control of Mexican ports, railways, tram systems, electrification and telegraphs, while major mining and agricultural interests came to be dominated by American dynasties such as the Hearsts and the Guggenheims. As a result, Mexico became increasingly dependent on – and oriented towards – US capital and markets. In this light, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 can be understood in part as one of the world’s first anti-economic nationalist revolutions: a revolt against extensive US corporate control. It was during interventions such as William Walker’s in Nicaragua that intellectuals and opponents began to describe themselves as ‘Latin American’, in contrast to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ America. Latin America was imagined as humanist and universal, embodying the redemptive promise of the New World, whereas Anglo-Saxon America was cast as utilitarian, capitalist, interventionist and imperial. The term ‘Latin America’ thus emerged directly from the experience of intervention, as a political and cultural identity defined in opposition to US power. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2664467webready-c9a09c0-e1774614810877.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white historical photograph showing a group of armed horsemen and soldiers moving along a dusty road. A man in a wide‑brimmed hat rides at the front, followed by other mounted riders and a horse‑drawn cart carrying supplies. More figures and distant buildings appear in the background." title="Mexican rebel leader Pancho Villa leads his forces in 1911. The revolution in which he played a pivotal role can be understood in part as “a revolt against extensive US corporate control”, explains Greg Grandin (Image by Getty Images)" /> Has there been any consistency to Washington’s long intervention in Latin America? US support for Latin American governments has generally rested on a few core criteria. The first is cooperation: regimes are backed so long as they align with US interests, whatever those may be at the time. Before the Civil War, for example, Southern slaveholding interests wanted Mexico to return escaped slaves and buy plantation cotton. The second criterion is stability, particularly the ability of a regime to protect US property and economic relations. At later points, additional layers of justification were added – democracy, elections, political liberalism, freedom – but these emerged largely as rhetorical frameworks rather than as original guiding principles. A decisive shift occurred with the War of 1898 against Spain. Cuba, unlike much of Spanish America, had not gained independence in the 1820s. Instead, it experienced a prolonged independence struggle beginning in 1868 and intensifying again in the mid-1890s, by which point Cuban forces were close to defeating Spain. US intervention in 1898 pre-empted this largely indigenous independence movement and replaced it with a form of informal American rule. Read more | In the aftermath of WW2, why did FDR’s Latin American experiment end in abject failure? The brutality of Spain’s counterinsurgency was widely publicised by the Hearst press and other proponents of ‘yellow’ [sensationalist] journalism, fuelling public pressure for action. Although Spanish atrocities were real, their depiction was used to legitimise US intervention. This marked a significant turning point: the US began to justify the projection of power in Latin America through the language of human rights. Throughout the 20th century, the extent to which the US invoked democracy, human rights or humanitarian concerns would fluctuate, but the precedent established in 1898 proved enduring. Did US intervention in Latin America change during the Cold War in terms of ideology, scale or rationale? You cannot understand the Cold War in Latin America without first examining the 1930s and 1940s, when the region played a crucial role in supporting the US before and during the Second World War. When Franklin D Roosevelt became president in 1933, he presided over a major shift in US policy towards Latin America. Latin American governments had long demanded that the US renounce its right to intervene, and recognise the full sovereignty of individual nations, effectively rejecting the old doctrine of conquest. Facing the constraints of the Great Depression, Roosevelt acquiesced, fundamentally altering US-Latin American relations. Economic nationalists in the region gained unprecedented support. When Bolivia and Mexico expropriated foreign holdings, FDR allowed it. The US even provided funding to build steel factories in Mexico and Brazil. This reflected a broader ‘continental New Deal’ in which governments actively sought to regulate capital and create distributive states, with US backing. Strategically, this policy shift was critical. As global conflict loomed, US planners feared that Latin America could follow a trajectory similar to Franco’s Spain: small landed elites controlling most property, a largely peasant class, militant labour unions challenging entrenched hierarchies, and authoritarian nationalism. FDR’s support for reformers and social democracy prevented this, and nearly every Latin American country – with the exception of Argentina until later – aligned with the Allied cause. The fight against fascism became linked to the promotion of social reform and inclusive governance. However, the postwar shift was abrupt. By 1947, the US pivoted from fighting fascism to combating communism. Weapons, tanks, warships and aircraft supplied under Lend-Lease to Latin American militaries were suddenly being used against leftwing movements rather than fascist threats. In Chile, for example, equipment provided to fight fascism was deployed in 1948 to suppress a labour strike, in action orchestrated by a young lieutenant named Augusto Pinochet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-515108946webready-3f9b8de-e1774615079787.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man wearing a formal gray military uniform with red and gold accents stands in an indoor setting with chandeliers and red curtains. Several people stand behind him, including one holding a notepad and pen, suggesting an official or press setting." title="Augusto Pinochet, pictured after his coup ousting Chile’s government in 1973. While overtly anti-drugs, his regime profited from cocaine trafficking (Image by Getty Images)" /> At every level, US policy reversed. Intelligence and surveillance, previously focused on rightwing threats, turned towards leftwing actors. This abrupt, violent realignment established patterns of polarisation across the region, setting the stage for insurgencies, anti-communist regimes and continued US intervention throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s. How have Latin Americans regarded the US historically? The relationship has always been shaped by tension between admiration and critique, often influenced by class position. From the very beginning of Spanish American independence, some reformers saw the US as a model of dynamism. Simón Bolívar, for example, admired its rapid creation of a market society, its settler communities of yeoman farmers and its agricultural and manufacturing growth. At the same time, he recognised that Latin America lacked the social foundations to replicate that model. Centuries of Spanish rule had concentrated wealth and power in a small class of landlords overseeing a vast, racialised majority, meaning it would require a more activist government to foster social and economic development. This tension persisted across generations. Francisco Bilbao, active in the 1840s and 1850s, initially saw the US as a liberal model. But after the loss of Texas, parts of Mexico and events such as William Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua, he turned critical. Bilbao popularised the term ‘Latin America’ and framed a cultural opposition: the US as Sparta, militaristic and self-interested, with Latin America as Athens, humanist and aspirational. The United States’ wealth and power remained magnetic, inspiring admiration and emulation. Yet Latin America also developed a coherent critique of its underdevelopment, noting recurring political crises and economic dependence. By the 20th century, ideas that would later be called dependency theory explained Latin America’s position in the global system: the prosperity of the ‘first world’ relied on the relative immiseration of the ‘third world’, maintained through structural inequalities. Thus Latin American attitudes toward the US were always ambivalent – drawn to its model of development, yet aware of its role in a system of exploitation. This tension shaped much of Latin America’s political and economic thought throughout the 20th century. Which historical figure best exemplifies that tension? Fidel Castro is a perfect example. As a youth, he once sent a letter to FDR offering all of Cuba’s iron ore to build ships for the Second World War, requesting a 10-dollar bill in return. However, Castro came of age in the late 1940s, after the US had shifted sharply from its pre-Cold War Pan-American cooperation to a policy defined by anti-communism. University students such as Castro quickly recognised the consequences of this policy change, while older, established politicians were slower to see it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Getty71219784webready-6256d68-e1774614995133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white image showing a large group of uniformed men wearing berets and military-style clothing, standing in formation with rifles raised, with their backs to the cameras. Beyond them is an ornate neoclassical building with a prominent dome, suggesting a significant civic or governmental setting." title="Fidel Castro addresses a rally in Havana in 1961, weeks before the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. Though supportive of the US during the Second World War, Castro came to see it as an adversary (Image by Getty Images)" /> Castro initially saw the US as an inspiration – a model for social democracy. Yet, following the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and American efforts to isolate and overthrow his government, that perception was decisively transformed. The US went from being a potential model to a powerful adversary to be resisted rather than emulated. How did the ‘War on Drugs’ change US intervention in Latin America in the late 20th century? The origins of that campaign, declared by Richard Nixon in 1971, can be traced back to the end of the Vietnam War, when many returning US troops were addicted to heroin – some units reportedly had a 50 per cent addiction rate. Nixon responded by creating the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973, which became the primary instrument of US drug policy both domestically and abroad. Its first major operations were in Mexico, where poppy cultivation had surged to meet demand from returning veterans. DEA cooperation with Mexican military and police produced a scorched-earth approach, with northern villages destroyed in a manner likened to South-East Asia. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-516525510webready-f39e978-e1774615534817.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in a light short‑sleeve shirt crouches next to a stack of tightly wrapped rectangular packages. They hold an object in one hand and reach toward a package with the other. The scene is outdoors beside a brick wall and chain‑link fence, with tools and bags in the background." title="A US customs agent examines drugs seized in Mexico, 1969. Cultivation of opium poppies soared there from the late 1960s, and Mexico became an early battlefield in the War on Drugs (Image by Getty Images)" /> From that point, the War on Drugs developed a logic of its own, largely immune from political critique. Unlike the CIA or FBI, the DEA was rarely challenged, and its operations in Latin America proceeded with broad bipartisan support. A recurring dynamic emerged: US-backed repressive governments often became involved in drug production, yet simultaneously cooperated with the DEA to suppress it. Augusto Pinochet in Chile illustrates this paradox. After the CIA-backed coup of 11 September 1973, he presented himself as both anti-communist and capable of eliminating drug production, endearing himself to the Nixon administration. Yet Pinochet’s regime profited enormously from cocaine, including ‘black cocaine’ designed to evade detection, while collaborating with the DEA to suppress what were essentially his competitors elsewhere in the region. Read more | Max Hastings on the Cuban Missile Crisis: "If the Americans had bombed Cuba in 1962, escalation would have been almost inevitable" Similar patterns occurred in Bolivia, where CIA-backed ‘cocaine coups’ in the 1960s and 1970s brought rightwing regimes to power. These regimes facilitated production and used paramilitaries and death squads for political repression, while simultaneously inviting DEA involvement. Colombia later became the largest example of this dynamic, with rightwing political forces deeply invested in emerging cartels, while the US attempted to eradicate them. This contradictory pattern persists today: US policy simultaneously facilitates and combats drug production. Former CIA agent John Stockwell summarised it starkly: every major CIA operation has left behind a significant cartel, a pattern tracing back to post-Second World War Italy, beginning with gangsters such as Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. In Latin America, then, US covert operations, political repression and counter-narcotics efforts have been inextricably intertwined for decades. Can we identify a common thread running through the history of US-Latin American relations? Latin America has served two central functions for the United States. First, it socialises the US, teaching it the limits of its power and shaping its sense of responsibility. Latin American opposition to interventionism and insistence on sovereignty – most clearly recognised by FDR in 1933 – grounded the US, forcing it to confront the realities of the hemisphere rather than pursue expansive fantasies such as Jefferson’s vision of a Saxon-dominated continent from the Arctic to Antarctica. In this way, Latin America has at times strengthened US governance and the responsible exercise of power. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2254194418webready-225e742-e1774615611866.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two individuals wearing jackets labeled “DEA” hold a person in a tan jacket by the arms as they walk along a dock or waterfront. The person’s hands are held together as if restrained, and water is visible in the background." title="US federal agents escort Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to court in New York following his capture in January 2026 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Second, Latin America functions as a testing ground. It is where US businesses gained their first international experience, banks expanded abroad, and the military conducted its first operations. It is also where domestic political coalitions are practised and forged. For example, by recognising national sovereignty and signing free-trade treaties, FDR strengthened a progressive corporate bloc that supported redistribution, the creation of a middle class and labour rights. This helped stabilise the New Deal order through the 1960s. Decades later, Ronald Reagan used Latin America in a similar way. Facing domestic crises – stagflation, rising energy prices, the aftermath of Vietnam and the Iranian Revolution – he combined economic and military intervention in Central and South America with a vision of universalist capitalism. Latin America became a space where Reagan fused markets and militarists, bringing together various different types of conservatives into a governing coalition. In short, Latin America helps socialise the US, so that Washington can wield its power more precisely and, during crises caused by global overreach, it serves as a workshop where new coalitions can rebuild power. Greg Grandin is Peter V and C Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale University. His latest book is America, América (Torva, 2025) This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
"Let the sky rain potatoes!": the hidden meanings behind Shakespeare's food obsession
Shakespeare and his peers served up hearty helpings of diverse dishes and ingredients – many of them spiced with forgotten meanings. Sam Bilton reveals how food allusions illustrate key themes of everyday life
“There shall be no more cakes and ale” Puritan hypocrisy Shakespeare’s works are peppered with countless food references: pies, cakes, capons and a great deal of sherry, for starters. Some are set-dressing details, but many were allusions that would have been obvious to theatregoers of the day – references to dietary theory, political ideas and cultural mores. Food was important to all – something to which everyone could relate, irrespective of social standing or level of literacy. Take the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night when the fun-loving Sir Toby Belch asks Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-171071495webready-c1637ad-e1774448528234.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A figure dressed in theatrical, jester‑style attire poses against a sepia, textured backdrop. They wear a tall hat with a pom‑pom, a large ruffled collar, and a voluminous dark cloak. One hand holds a slender staff; the other holds a small object topped with a circular shape" title="Malvolio in Twelfth Night. This pompous Puritan is ridiculed for censuring ‘ales’ (festive social gatherings) (Image by Getty Images)" /> In Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘ale’ referred not only to a drink but also to social gatherings celebrating everything from religious holidays (for example, Whitsun-ales) to weddings – hence the word ‘bridal’, from ‘bride-ale’. In this period, cake was more akin to brioche, and contained expensive ingredients such as sugar, spices and exotic dried fruit – definitely a luxury. Cakes and ale parties were occasional treats for most – and strictly off-limits to Puritans. So, in this scene, Sir Toby is ridiculing Malvolio’s prim and proper attitude, calling him a party pooper. In his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson also highlights the hypocrisy of religious zealots. The Puritan pastor Zeal-of-the-land Busy is a former baker of cakes “served to bridals, may-poles, morrices, and such profane feasts and meetings”. Busy is highly critical of displays of gluttony, such as eating a hog roast at the fair, particularly by women. Yet moments before he launches into a diatribe against eating pork in public, he is caught “fast by the teeth in the cold turkey-pie in the cupboard, with a great white loaf on his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right”. White bread and malmsey wine were trappings of a well-to-do lifestyle. As for Malvolio, he throws his righteousness out of the window the minute he comes to believe – falsely – that Olivia is in love with him. He is described as plumping his proverbial feathers like a “turkeycock” and imagining himself wearing velvet, a fabric reserved for nobility. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/hip1620562webready-fd246db-e1774448660973.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A formal banquet scene shows richly dressed figures seated and standing around a long table covered with a white cloth. Servants and guests interact as food and drink are served, with architectural details and a distant landscape visible in the background." title="A 19th-century illustration of a banquet scene in The Taming of the Shrew. In Shakespeare’s play, Petruchio hopes to soften his wife Katherina’s ‘choler’ (ill-temper) by restricting her diet (Image by Topfoto)" /> “Did he marry me to famish me?” Balancing humours In the early modern period, the prevailing Galenic theory of health held that a person’s physical well-being was governed by four ‘humours’ in the body: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. For good health, these humours had to be in balance; if one dominated, it could result in physical or mental issues. For example, people with an excess of black bile were inclined to despondency and introspection, like Jacques in As You Like It. In The Taming of the Shrew, newly wed Katherina is “Renown’d in Padua for her scolding tongue”. According to the humoural theory of the period, this behaviour would indicate an excess of yellow bile, making her ‘choleric’, or quick to anger. Read more | Shakespeare didn't love his wife and he abandoned his family to move to London: are these 13 rumours about the playwright true? Such a humoural imbalance might be treated through diet. Foods were also classified by their nature: hot, dry, cold or wet. Essentially, you were what you ate. ‘Choleric’ people such as Katherina were considered to be hot and dry, so foods of a similar nature could potentially exacerbate the imbalance and make these folk even more irritable. At the beginning of Act IV, Katherina’s husband, Petruchio, orders the removal from the table of some overdone mutton because it “engenders choler, planteth anger”. Later in the same act, Petruchio’s manservant, Grumio, offers Katherina a series of tempting foods culminating in a dish of beef and mustard – but retracts all of these in turn, deeming them too choleric. Exasperated and hungry, Katherina chases Grumio from the room, shouting: “Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave, That feed’st me with the very name of meat.” By denying Katherina sustenance, Petruchio is hoping to correct her behaviour and rebalance her humours. Clearly, he was not familiar with the concept of being ‘hangry’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1314701597webready-3135879-e1774448807729.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A humorous scene shows three soldiers in colourful Renaissance clothing. One sits on the ground grimacing beside a broken sword, with a leek stuck in his mouth while the central standing figure lifts a stick as if scolding or threatening him. A third soldier in blue stands behind them holding a spear and smiling. Rows of tents and distant mountains form the backdrop." title="A Georgian print shows proud Welshman Fluellen forcing the sneery English ensign Pistol (left) to eat a raw leek – with potentially unpleasant health consequences – in Henry V (Image by Getty Images)" /> "If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek" National pride In Shakespeare’s day, experts on dietary theory regarded leeks as food for rustics who had strong constitutions – they were unsuitable for more gentrified folk. At best, when cooked in a pottage, leeks had a diuretic effect – good for drawing out phlegm. At worst, eating them could cause toothache, flatulence, headaches and nightmares. So leeks, particularly in their raw state, were best avoided – which may explain why they feature in so few recipes found in early modern cookbooks. For the Welsh, however, the leek was an emblem of national pride. Leeks were worn in Monmouth caps on Saint David’s Day (1 March) to commemorate the Welsh victory over the Saxons in the sixth century. So in Henry V, the Welsh captain Fluellen is incensed when the ensign Pistol mocks that emblem, and jibes that the Welshman eats his leek with bread and salt, thereby demoting it to a basic food stuff. In Act 5, Scene 1, Fluellen exacts his revenge by beating Pistol with a raw leek then forcing him to eat it, exclaiming: “Because, look you, you do not love it, nor your affections and your appetites and your digestions does not agree with it, I would desire you to eat it.” Though this scene undoubtedly has comic undertones, Shakespeare’s audiences would also have been well aware of the potential consequences for Pistol’s health. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ali051530webready-d1a9ba0-e1774448887475.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval illustration depicts two adults working at a wooden table, kneading a large round mass of dough. A child in blue stands in a doorway to the left, observing, while a white dog drinks from the ground beneath the table. The building has patterned walls and two leafy trees stand nearby." title="Women make butter in an illustration from a medieval health treatise. People from the Low Countries were known for their love of butter, which was thought to ward off colic (Image by Topfoto)" /> “I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter” Attitudes to immigrants Food was often used to highlight cultural stereotypes. For example, the Flemish and Dutch were renowned for their love of butter. In Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (c1605/06), Mosca says: “You shall ha’ some will swallow / A melting heir, as glibly, as your Dutch / Will pills of butter, and ne’re purge for’t.” So: dishonest people swindle the naive without remorse – or as blithely as the Dutch eat butter. Read more | The simple secret that kept the ordinary Tudor diet surprisingly healthy Foreign characters were often played for laughs, but some food references reveal deeper prejudices. In Sir Thomas More, attributed to Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle with revisions by others including Shakespeare, xenophobic English merchants decry immigrants for introducing parsnips into the country. The fear is that these “strange roots” grown in manure cause disease: “Trash, trash; they breed sore eyes, and tis enough to infect the city with the palsey.” That play also expresses a fear that immigrants in London were eating more than their fair share of food, and stealing local people’s livelihoods: “For so it is that aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children, and take the living from all the artificers and the intercourse from all the merchants, whereby poverty is so much increased.” Such lines reflect attitudes of the day to foreigners in England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BAL179666webready-51e7483-e1774448962531.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A side‑by‑side botanical illustration shows a yam (Dioscorea alata) on the left and a sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) on the right. Each plant is drawn with its brown tuber, green leaves, and distinctive flowers—small buds on the yam and pinkish‑purple funnel‑shaped blooms on the sweet potato." title="Sweet potato, shown here, was an exotic luxury in Shakespeare’s time, and believed to have aphrodisiac properties (Image by Bridgeman)" /> “Let the sky rain potatoes!” Exotic aphrodisiacs Modern theatregoers watching The Merry Wives of Windsor may be puzzled by Sir John Falstaff’s line invoking a bombardment of potatoes – particularly in what is supposed to be a scene of seduction or, as Falstaff puts it, “a tempest of provocation”. But in Shakespeare’s day, certain foods were believed to have aphrodisiac properties – among them the exotic potato, along with the eryngo (sea holly) roots also mentioned in this speech. The tubers invoked in Shakespeare’s play were most likely what was then known as the Spanish variety, or sweet potatoes. At that time, these were viewed as novelty foods and, therefore, luxuries, not staples. They were often preserved with sugar – also considered a lust-inducing ingredient – and aromatics such as rosewater. One 16th-century cook, Thomas Dawson, included potatoes in his recipe for ‘A Tart That Is a Courage to a Man or Woman’, along with quinces (another aphrodisiac), sugar, spices and cock-sparrow brains. The recipe ends with the instruction: “So let it boyle till it be something bigge”. This probably isn’t a euphemism for anything saucy – but, given the lusty nature of the ingredients, who’s to say what Dawson is really driving at? Incidentally, during this period parsnips were also believed to promote lustful urges – another strike against the foreigners who introduced that root vegetable, and who were often viewed as being lascivious. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/MARXC2webready-a3df156-e1774449069447.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval-style scene depicts two figures seated together in a large wooden tub beneath a blue canopy. The person on the right is reaching across to touch the breast of the other person in the tub. Two attendants in long gowns stand beside them, one carrying a jug and the other a plate. A brick wall and window frame the setting" title="A colourised 16th-century woodcut shows a couple being served food and drink while frolicking in a bath. Stewed prunes were associated with brothels, possibly based on a belief that they helped protect against sexually transmitted diseases (Image by Alamy)" /> “I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since” Witty innuendo While some foods were believed to boost sexual appetites and performance, others were considered to provide protection from associated risks. For example, unlikely as it seems today, in earlier times stewed prunes were associated with prostitutes and brothels. In the satirical poem The Knave of Harts (1612) by Samuel Rowlands, a “whoring knave” is served with ‘‘Burnt wine, stew’d Prunes, a Puncke [prostitute] to solace him”. Why the reference to prunes here? One theory is that they were believed to protect against sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. Links between prostitution and food don’t end with prunes. Take the following line spoken by Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence – three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes – and, by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.” Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century The first part implies that he is talking about a fencing match – but what on earth do prunes and hot meat have to do with swordplay? The reference to stewed prunes suggests that Slender is in fact talking about an episode in a brothel. In addition, prostitutes were often compared to joints of meat such as mutton – hence the end of his comment. When the Hostess in Henry IV, Part 2 quips: “What’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?” she’s saying that a dalliance with a prostitute (or two) can do no harm, even for the virtuous. So the “hot meat” to which Slender refers is a sex worker, and veney is an archaic English word meaning a bout or thrust. Essentially, he is talking about a poor sexual encounter with a prostitute. So why not have Slender say more plainly: “I had a bad experience with a prostitute, and now I’m sworn off all women”? Given the sexual innuendo prevalent in early modern plays, it seems unlikely that the use of food references to allude to sex was an attempt to avoid censorship – in fact, blasphemy and political comments were more likely to upset the authorities. In any case, the meaning of these phrases was entirely transparent at the time. Rather, food references – in the comedies, particularly – injected added wit into dialogue. Sam Bilton is a food historian, author and podcaster. Her latest book is Much Ado About Cooking: Delicious Shakespearean Feasts for Every Occasion (OH, 2025) This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Ringing the changes: how the telephone transformed Victorian Britain
To celebrate 150 years since the first telephone call was made, Michael Kay and Coreen McGuire describe how the device reshaped social interactions in Britain – and the somewhat surprising ways it was first used
In autumn 1883, an unusual news story captured the imagination of the British public. It was a tale of deception, fraud – and telephones. On Friday 21 September, a young barrister’s clerk in Birmingham, Robert Danks, set in motion a plan to commit fraud. First he forged a message from a solicitor asking his boss, Jesse Herbert, to travel out of town. Next, he telephoned the office of Herbert’s friend, Alfred Young. Speaking to the clerk, Danks – impersonating Herbert – said he had been called away but had left his cheque book at home. Would Mr Young please lend him £5 (equivalent to more than £500 today – five times Danks’ weekly wage)? Deceived, the clerk agreed, and was told to expect Danks to collect the money – which he did, absconding with it the next day. The story was reported at length across the country – not least because of the novel and ingenious (for the time) method of Danks’ deceit. This was, one commentator noted, the first time the telephone had been used for such fraud – a landmark of sorts in the technology’s short history. Sound idea The first practical functioning telephone was developed by Scottish-born engineer and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who lived and worked in Canada and the US during the second half of the 19th century. He worked extensively on hearing and speech, experimenting with hearing-aid devices and then acoustic telegraphy – efforts that led to the development of the telephone. Bell was issued the US patent for his telephone on 7 March 1876 – 150 years ago this month. The Bell Telephone Company was established the following year, and within a decade tens of thousands of telephone sets were in use across the US. The first successful demonstration in Britain took place in 1877, and the first telephone exchanges opened in London two years later. By the time of Danks’ fraudulent call, small exchanges up and down the UK were being operated by different companies, invariably serving local business communities. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-464474699webready-add59a2-e1774011650108.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph two women sitting at a low table in front of a large wall with several thick wires across it. Each woman is dressed in a long Victorian dress, with their hair up" title="Wired for sound Telephonists at work for the General Post Office c1905. The GPO gradually replaced local exchanges across Britain at the turn of the 20th century. (Image by GettyImages)" /> But were people talking about telephones more than they were talking through them? When it was first introduced, everyone agreed that the telephone was a marvellous invention – though its purpose was far from clear. Was it a device for relaying the sounds of concerts and church sermons? Perhaps it was more useful in the mining industry, utilising the telephone microphone’s sensitivity to vibrations in order to monitor the quality and density of air, and so guard against the build-up of explosive gases? People did use the telephone to speak to each other, but a subscription to a telephone exchange was expensive – often £15 or £20 a year – so for the first several decades in Britain it remained very much a business tool. As well as barristers such as Herbert and Young, early exchange telephone subscribers included companies involved in large local industries – for example, wool in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, jute in Dundee and steel in Sheffield. Also prominent in early telephone directories are professional firms such as solicitors, doctors and banks, as well as local councils and chambers of commerce. In those first decades, contemporaries observed how few telephone subscribers and devices the UK had compared with other countries. That’s in part because the communications context at that time was rich and diverse. Thanks to the success of the telegraph system, the effective penny post service and cheap messenger boys, the telephone had less immediate impact on communication in Britain than elsewhere. Read more | The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency In addition, the usefulness of exchange telephony depended entirely on who else was also using it. This did not necessarily mean that being in a bigger network was better: many subscribers preferred smaller, more exclusive networks. Subscribers were also concerned about privacy: they didn’t want to be available to just anyone who could wander into a public call office and make demands on their time – nor to leave themselves open to fraudsters like Danks. In short, it suited many subscribers to keep the telephone network limited. And certainly, no one could imagine why the ‘working man’ might need a telephone. Regardless of subscribers’ preferences, exchange companies realised the importance of encouraging groups of subscribers to join at the same time. This often meant targeting professional communities such as lawyers or doctors, whose offices tended to cluster together in the same geographical area within a town. Many companies sold telephony by advertising that they connected their exchanges up to local police and fire stations, and sometimes also to doctors. In sickness and in health In August 1879, shortly before the first British telephone exchanges were established, Eva Lückes wrote a letter to the Telephone Company, which had been established to promote Bell’s patents in Britain. Lückes – the lady superintendent at the Hospital for Sick Children in Pendlebury, Manchester – wanted to thank the company for her telephones. These were used throughout the hospital, but had proved most valuable in the fever ward, where telephony enabled communication without the risk of infection. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-463911827webready-5706511-e1774011631346.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful illustration shows four men at dinner: three are sitting at the table while another stands up alongside them. To the right, another man in a suit, carrying a tray is talking into a large tube, sending a message to the room below" title="Upstairs, downstairs A waiter talks to kitchen staff in a restaurant. Before telephony, the speaking tube was a relatively common way to communicate. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Over the next few years, other medical professionals extolled the virtues of the telephone. “All of us must have felt the heartaching anxiety of longing to hear the voice of a dear friend when either ourselves lying on, or the friend being confined to, a bed of sickness,” noted the medical journal The Lancet. Unlike the speaking tubes that had been common for some time, but through which infection could be transmitted, telephones allowed contagious patients speak directly to family and friends while remaining safely isolated. Following an outbreak of scarlet fever in London in 1887, The Lancet was moved to recognise that this kind of remote contact had a curative power. The strength of this belief increased as the system proliferated, and special telephones for hospital patients were increasingly commonplace in the interwar years. In addition, the telephone achieved lasting clinical utility as an audiometer – a device to quantify individual levels of hearing loss in numerical terms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/HHG5ADwebready-cb80a99-e1774011609462.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Testing time An illustration shows a young man’s hearing being assessed using a Hughes audiometer, invented by David Edward Hughes c1879. (Image by Alamy)" title="Testing time An illustration shows a young man’s hearing being assessed using a Hughes audiometer, invented by David Edward Hughes c1879. (Image by Alamy)" /> Despite these benefits, many people feared that the telephone might pose risks, particularly to users’ mental health. In May 1879, The Times lamented that businessmen’s lives had become increasingly busy, unpredictable and reactive following the advent of telegraphy – a situation that would only get worse with the proliferation of telephones. Concerns about how telephony had increased the pace of modern life, and the associated stress that came with this, were commonplace in this period. In October 1882, the popular science writer Phoebe Lankester encountered a telephone in a private house, and wrote in her newspaper column that: “Extraordinary as this novel invention is, I am not sure that I quite like the idea of its intrusion into our domestic scenes at any moment of the day… [W]hen it comes to being at the beck and call of any intrusive person who may possess a telephonic wire… no man’s house can thenceforth be called his castle, unless he be brave enough to resist such innovations, and leave himself far behind the rest of the impetuous world – in peace.” Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain This combination of excitement and anxiety typified the Victorian response to the telephone in the business and domestic spheres. In public spaces, too, overhead telephone wires raised concerns, being viewed as unsightly at best, and even dangerous. Accidents involving falling telephone wires were rare but reported widely. In 1885, the council in Bath was reluctant to establish an exchange at all, citing concerns that overhead wires would disfigure the city, a picturesque and popular tourist destination. The GPO intervenes In most towns and cities, exchanges were established by large companies that were offshoots of the US Bell Telephone Company, operating using Bell’s patents. The largest of these was the National Telephone Company (NTC), which eventually absorbed the other companies operating in different regions around the UK. However, in late 1879, as the first British telephone companies began to establish exchanges, the General Post Office (GPO) successfully argued that the telephone came under its monopoly on telegraphic communications. This was based on its ownership of the telegraph network, which had been nationalised in 1870. As a result of this legal decision, telephone companies required GPO licences to operate. In addition, the GPO began to open its own exchanges around the country. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3315417webready-054117c-e1774011586519.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Historical photograph of a spacious telephone exchange filled with rows of operators working at manual switchboards. The high, vaulted ceiling and hanging lights frame dozens of workers plugging cables to connect calls" title="from low volume levels to overhearing private conversations between other people. (Image by GettyImages)" /> In towns such as Sheffield, Dundee, Swansea and Preston, local people also established their own exchanges. Despite patent disputes and fierce competition from the larger companies, these were able to operate for many years. Cleverly branding themselves as being run by and for local people, these companies charged lower subscriptions, enabling a broader range of businesses to sign up. They often inspired greater loyalty among their subscribers than the larger companies. Together, these factors meant that, by the late 1880s, towns such as Dundee and Sheffield had some of the most developed exchange telephone infrastructure anywhere in the country. For 30 years, therefore, provision was quite messy, with different companies and the GPO providing services in different areas. This situation ended only in 1912 when the NTC, the last remaining private telephone company, was nationalised. Wartime lifeline Although telephony seemed to be gaining ground in Britain, many in the military still viewed it with scepticism. Telephones proved suitable for point-to-point communication with surveillance balloons from the ground below, and were used as Morse receivers, but they seemed unlikely to replace messenger communications. How could you trust that a barely audible message relayed via this method was sufficiently secure during battle? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3243926webready-bca04cb-e1774011559272.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a soldier kneeling outdoors, holding a field‑telephone receiver to the ear while speaking into it. The device is wired to a wooden pole fitted with multiple cables and a small switchboard‑like unit. The barren, muddy landscape suggests a wartime setting" title="in October 1918. The needs of the military drove innovations in telephony during the First World War. (Image by GettyImages)" /> The dark, isolated and stagnant conditions of mechanised conflict in the First World War changed everything. Suddenly, telephones became a lifeline – a crucial means of communicating between trenches and relaying news from the battlefront to headquarters. By 1920, the GPO had, at great cost, supplied 40,000 specially protected telephones to the army, meaning they were unable to invest in the development of telephone technology on the home front. Yet this expense was hidden from the public, who complained extensively about the failings of domestic telephony. Reliance on this technology in the context of war drove innovations in audibility and portability. Crucially, clearer transmission of speech was vital, and equipment needed to be light enough for repeated dismantling and movement. These aims were in tension, because improvements to audibility added weight. Improved audibility was also important for the generation of men who had fought in the war. Many of these servicemen suffered deafness or hearing loss from the bombardment of artillery and shells. In 1928, the National Benevolent Society recorded that “33,768 men were discharged from the army and navy on account of deafness”. Symptoms of deafness or deaf mutism also presented with shell shock. So hearing loss was regarded as a national problem in the interwar years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3301550webready-8b9948e-e1774266801629.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a woman standing in country road, looking up some fallen telegraph lines. In the background, a small bus is driving towards the camera" title="A woman gazes in bemusement at storm-damaged telephone wires in south Wales, 1939. Overhead lines were initially viewed as unsightly or even dangerous. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Though valve technology had improved the telephone, individual voices remained hard to comprehend. Early telephone lines were noisy, open and messy, with background noise described in a Birmingham newspaper in 1888 as “a buzzing obbligato which gives a faint suggestion of bees, but has no precise resemblance to anything in nature”. In addition, problems of induction between overhead wires, with signals from one call leaking into another, often led to subscribers being able to overhear supposedly private conversations. This had obvious privacy implications for those engaged in business conversations, as did fears of exchange operators listening in on calls. In 1897, a Glasgow corn merchant, Anton Kufeke, described overhearing a conversation between his competitor and a customer, thereby learning that the competitor was selling more cheaply than he was. This was sensitive business information. In 1893, another Glasgow subscriber recounted a conversation he had overheard between a man and a woman: after a brief exchange, the man announced that he was going for a clean shave – and another listener on the line commented “Is that a clean shirt you’re going for? You need one badly”. The conversation finished with various listeners joining in a rendition of a popular song. Read More | How did Bletchley Park shape the success of D-Day? Agitations from exchange subscribers in Leeds and Glasgow in local newspapers in the late 1880s and early 1890s illustrate the great difficulties many faced in trying to use their telephones. One correspondent in Leeds wrote that: “I occupy more time in communicating through it than I should do if I went to the offices or places of business of nine out of ten of the persons with whom I wish to communicate.” A Glasgow subscriber said that one thing he had learned from using the telephone and overhearing his colleagues and neighbours was just how much they swore when frustrated. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-515579042webready-0db1e60-e1774267416605.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a telephone operator seated at a manual switchboard. She wears a cloth mask over her nose and mouth and speaks into a candlestick‑style telephone. Papers and notes lie on the desk beside the switchboard equipment" title="Wearing a gauze mask, a telephone operator works during the devastating flu pandemic that spread across the world from 1918 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Restricted information A broad range of people struggled with such issues, including some who had trouble following telephone conversations yet didn’t consider themselves to have hearing loss in other contexts. It was strange to have access to speech without visual information. Moreover, the frequency band of the telephone was restricted, so people making or receiving calls were receiving far less sonic information than when talking in person. These difficulties are clear from a 1923 advice sheet issued by the GPO. This gave instructions on what to say when picking up the receiver, and how to speak with maximum audibility and effectiveness. Users were counselled to speak “clearly”, and to roll the rhotic R when saying the number three, because the telephone would blur consonants and elide vowel sounds. “The telephone is no louder or clearer now than it was 40 years ago,” HA Garratt complained to The Times in 1934. Although he admitted that he was “just the least bit deaf”, he still could hear the wireless perfectly well, which led him to conclude that the telephone model he possessed was faulty. Faced with such criticisms, it became clear how the GPO could both recoup financial losses sustained in the war and move beyond issuing edicts to encourage clear speech: by repurposing technology used in the trenches to create amplified telephony. When the telephone was first introduced, the deaf community was excited about the possibility that the new device could be used as a hearing aid. Bell’s wife and mother were both deaf, and the telephone had in fact been initially designed as a type of hearing aid. Instead, it initially excluded the hard of hearing. Moreover, its development encouraged the measurement of levels of deafness in increasingly narrow and strict terms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/10720997webready-b2202ae-e1774266977716.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A small brown pouch with a long strap, alongside two small vials, one yellow, one black. The vials are attached to a small black box which has a pale wire with an earpiece attached to it" title="Hear this A body-worn Medresco portable hearing aid. Such analogue devices were supplied by the NHS from the late 1940s until the early 1980s" /> The first amplified telephone designed for people with limited hearing was advertised by the GPO in 1924 “for the use of ‘Deaf Subscribers’ who experience difficulty in the use of the standard telephone”. It featured a controlling key to adjust the volume; this was stored in a separate wooden box, along with the valve amplifier. Following numerous complaints from customers about the stigmatising box, an improved amplifier telephone was released in 1934. The new device was cheaper, with a freehand microtelephone – the volume control being embedded in the telephone itself rather than in a box – and more powerful valves to boost the signal and increase the volume. Previous models comprised a separate receiver, held to the ear, and a transmitter into which one spoke. Newly integrated receivers combined the two, creating the telephone familiar to us today. When using early devices, people with hearing loss had been able to press the receiver to their mastoid bone, behind the ear, receiving the sounds via bone conduction. As the GPO explained, such users “had been accustomed to holding the bell receiver to the bone at the back of the ear to obtain best reception for his [sic] particular deafness”. This was not possible with the integrated receiver, and the GPO received a flood of complaints. In the UK, categories of deafness were defined according to audiological tests that were themselves biased, being driven by the GPO’s development of Artificial Ear technology. This machine designated standards of normal hearing in narrow mechanical parameters. The standardisation of ‘normal’ hearing and the categorisation of the deaf was therefore created in line with the priorities of the Post Office’s telephone system. Those who did not fit within the GPO’s standards were categorised as customers in need of a “telephone service for the deaf”. So ‘deafness’ was constructed both socially and technologically at the behest of the GPO. Despite these obvious limitations and biases, the GPO was a repository of expertise in electroacoustics in Britain during the interwar years, and it engineered the first NHS hearing aid – the Medresco. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1498115609webready-e515da9-e1774267518636.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a person in a fuzzy striped sweater standing beside a wooden bookshelf, holding a cream‑coloured rotary telephone receiver to their ear. Books, a potted plant, and framed botanical prints appear in the background" title="By 1960, when this studio portrait of a model was taken, telephones were installed in many British homes (Image by Getty Images)" /> Change and change again Today, an irony often highlighted is that technologies designed to bring us together are actually having the effect of isolating us. Yet, as we have seen, communication and isolation have been in tension since telephony began. The telephone was always perceived as a threat to societal mental health, and there were always isolated portions of society unable to make and receive calls easily. In recent years, mobile phones have changed our behaviour. Domestic landlines are becoming rarer, for example, largely replaced by smartphones. For a time, landlines were important for the roll-out of the internet, with dial-up connections being the norm before broadband usurped that technology. Today, many young people dislike speaking on the phone, instead preferring to communicate through text. But as we embrace a more individualistic model of telephony, do we appreciate what has been lost with the decline of the home phone, with access to it shared by members of a family or friend group? Whatever your take on such a question, aspects of mobile-phone culture might well seem familiar to our forebears. In 1885, a London-based commentator wryly described a group “telephone party”: “There sat about 15 well-dressed persons, gazing straight in front, apparently deep in thought, and with a black tube held up to one ear. They heeded not the entry of anyone, and silence and inactivity reigned supreme.” The ever-evolving telephone has radically reshaped our lives – but concerns about its impact on mental health and wellbeing are nothing new. Michael Kay is a senior learning designer at King’s College, London. Coreen McGuire is a historian of interwar Britain, and assistant professor of history at Durham University This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
History's most notorious crime scenes: from Lizzie Borden's lair to HH Holmes's 'murder castle'
What is it about places marked by murder and violence that continue to pique our interest, long after the crimes have been committed? Caitlin Blackwell Baines uncovers the history behind some of the world's most morbid locations – from a crumbling Slovakian castle to Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel
1. Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, United Kingdom Founded in AD 597, Canterbury Cathedral is Britain’s oldest and most important religious complex: the ‘mother church’ of the Anglican faith and seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. With its soaring 250-foot central tower and 13,000 square feet of stained-glass windows, the cathedral draws more than a million visitors each year – some who come to worship, others simply to marvel at its serene majesty. Such a setting would seem an unlikely place for a murder, but, ironically, that murder has been a big part of the pull for the past 850 or so years. The victim was Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who, on the night of 29 December 1170, was hacked to death in the cathedral’s northwest transept. Once a royal favourite – Henry II’s chancellor and closest confidant – Becket ran afoul of the monarch soon after being ordained in 1162. By refusing to uphold the king’s authority over that of the church in the following years, the archbishop effectively sealed his fate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/1-GettyImages-2188130261-ad7bb3e-e1773932992660.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval illuminated manuscript shows three armored knights striking a kneeling, haloed cleric at an altar. The cleric prays as blood streams from his head. A chalice and open book sit on the altar, and the background is filled with ornate red and gold patterns" title="A medieval manuscript illumination depicts Thomas Becket’s gruesome demise. The archbishop was brutally killed in Canterbury Cathedral, turning a place of worship into a crime scene" /> “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry is reported to have ranted to his courtiers. Interpreting this as a kind of kingly hit order, four of his knights stole away under the cover of night, travelling in secret from Normandy to Canterbury, where they accosted Becket as he entered the cathedral. At first, the knights attempted to arrest the cleric, but when he refused to accompany them, a violent scuffle broke out. As Becket desperately clung to a column, the knights slashed at him with their swords, eventually striking a fatal blow to the top of his head, spraying blood and gore across the cathedral floor. The gruesome crime shocked the whole of Christendom, quickly transforming victim into martyr, and crime scene into pilgrimage site. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2-GettyImages-999672134-08df4e0-e1773934721665.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A ruined stone castle stands on a rocky hilltop above a dense green forest, lit by warm sunrise or sunset light. Rolling hills fade into the distance under a soft pastel sky" title="A panoramic shot of Čachtice Castle, western Slovakia. Now a crumbling ruin, the castle was supposedly the site of dozens of murders perpetrated by Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Čachtice Castle, Slovakia You’ve probably heard of Castle Dracula, the seat of the titular character in Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel. But have you heard of Čachtice Castle? It is the setting for a real-life horror story far more frightening than anything dreamed up in Gothic fiction. Now a crumbling ruin, teetering on a rocky outcrop in the Trenchin region of western Slovakia, the castle was once home to Countess Elizabeth Báthory – purportedly the most prolific female serial killer in history. Čachtice Castle began its existence as a 13th-century fortress built to defend the western border of the Kingdom of Hungary. Over the centuries, it was expanded and transformed into a stately home. Passing through several hands, it eventually came into the possession of nobleman Francis Nádasdy II, who, in 1575, gifted it to his 14-year-old bride, Elizabeth Báthory, as a wedding present. By all accounts, the marriage of Francis and Elizabeth was a happy one. Home life at Čachtice Castle, on the other hand, was not exactly the picture of domestic bliss. With Francis frequently away on military campaigns against the Ottoman Turks, Elizabeth was left behind to manage the family’s household and vast estates, and in her husband’s absence, the countess seems to have taken up an unusual hobby: the torture and murder of her servants. Her many victims – a revolving door of peasant girls recruited from nearby villages – were variously cut, burnt, bitten, beaten, starved and even frozen to death. Posthumous rumours that Báthory bathed in the blood of her prey to preserve her youth have never been proven, but the available evidence suggests that her actions went far beyond that of a harsh mistress. Read more | Elizabeth Báthory: a 17th-century 'serial killer' She was a sadistic killer whose position of power and relative isolation at Čachtice Castle allowed her to operate unchecked for over two decades. During this time, she is estimated to have killed as many as 600 young women and girls. Had the cruel countess stuck to her original victim pool of poor servants, she may have escaped capture. Indeed, it was only when several young noblewomen invited to the castle to attend a gynaeceum (finishing school) went missing that the authorities finally took notice. In December 1610, Čachtice Castle was raided on the orders of King Matthias II. Báthory was seized during a post-Christmas feast – and not, as it was later claimed, in the middle of a murder. Owing to her high station, however, she managed to avoid trial (and inevitable execution) and was instead placed on house arrest in her castle. She died there four years later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-GettyImages-167652325-3e2d3aa-e1773934794798.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Historic three‑storey corner building with wrought‑iron balconies and arched windows in a busy street scene" title="The present-day LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans. The original building burned down in 1834, revealing evidence of Delphine LaLaurie’s horrific torture of enslaved people (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. LaLaurie Mansion, New Orleans, United States Sadistic slave-owning socialite Delphine LaLaurie might just be New Orleans’ answer to Countess Báthory. If ever you travel to the city, you will inevitably hear of the notorious madame and her house of horrors. It is a stately three-storey French empire-style townhouse located on Royal Street in the heart of the historic French Quarter, the city’s main tourist district. On 10 April 1834, the mansion caught fire, attracting a large crowd of curious onlookers. At the time, the LaLaurie Mansion was renowned for its lavish interiors and decadent soirees – as well as for something more sinister. Rumour had it that the mistress of the manor treated her slaves exceptionally cruelly – which spoke volumes, given that most slave-owners thought nothing of whipping their workers at the time. These rumours would soon prove to be true. When concerned members of the community entered the house to help extinguish the flames, they made a horrific discovery. According to reports, behind the padlocked door of the attic, they found “seven slaves more or less horribly mutilated… suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to another”. So shocking was the scene that the once-respected society hostess was run out of town by an angry mob. Nearly 200 years later, the legend of Madame LaLaurie lives on as one of the darkest chapters in the city’s pre-Civil War history. Though privately owned and publicly inaccessible, the present-day LaLaurie Mansion (rebuilt three years after the fire) still manages to draw hordes of tourists, who come to gawk at its paradoxically elegant exterior. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/4-GettyImages-117081718-8c2be8c-e1773938765180.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a worn brick building with an arched passageway and a sign reading ‘Millers Court." title="The exterior of 13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel, c1900. In 1888, the body of Mary Jane Kelly – the last of Jack the Ripper’s ‘canonical five’ victims – was discovered inside (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. 13 Miller's Court, London, United Kingdom No list of historical true crime would be complete without an entry on Jack the Ripper, the pseudonymous serial killer responsible for the brutal slayings of at least five women in London's Whitechapel district between August and November 1888. Easily the most infamous unsolved murders in global history, there’s no shortage of Ripper-related content out there: books, films, TV shows, websites – and even historical walking tours offering the opportunity to follow in the mysterious murderer’s footsteps. Of course, there’s not much for the modern Ripper tourist to see. The gritty East End streets that comprised the killer’s hunting grounds were long ago transformed as part of a series of early 20th-century improvement projects designed to eradicate the scourge that was the Whitechapel slums. But before this modern uplift, at least a few intrepid explorers were able to visit the crime scenes and view them much as the killer would have done. Read more | He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was On 20 December 1890, The Birmingham Mail published the account of one journalist’s journey through Jack the Ripper’s East London. The highlight of his adventures in so-called ‘Murderland’ was a trip to 13 Miller’s Court – the site of the last (and most ghastly) of the canonical Ripper murders. It was inside this squalid one room tenement that, just two years earlier, Mary Jane Kelly – a sex worker in her mid-20s – was found mutilated beyond all recognition. According to the journalist, “for a long time after the murder [the room] was vacant. Nobody would take it, owing to the rumour that it was haunted by Jack’s victim”. But, by the time of the journalist’s visit, it was occupied by “an old crone” and her “bedridden husband” who, for the “drop of half-a-crown” would show visitors the “ghastly relics of the crimes”. These included “a huge crimson stain” on the floor, “the fading imprints of a bloody hand on the wall”, and some pencil scratched graffiti purportedly left behind by the killer. Such “ghastly relics” were ultimately destroyed when, in 1928, the property was demolished to make way for the rebuilding of Spitalfields Market. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/5-GettyImages-145262286-5b9ade9-e1773938831936.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white sketch depicting a tall, three-storey building with several windows. Telegraph poles and lines stand outside the building, and the street out front has lots of people walking around" title="HH Holmes’ infamous ‘Murder Castle’ in Chicago. The three-storey structure, long since demolished, was rumoured to contain a network of secret passageways (Image by Getty Images)" /> 5. 'Murder Castle', Chicago, United States At around the same time that Jack the Ripper was roving the streets of Victorian London, another pseudonymous serial killer was wreaking havoc across the pond in Chicago. Operating under the alias ‘HH Holmes’, Herman Webster Mudgett was a conman posing as a pharmacist, who, between the years of 1891 and 1894, lured as many as 200 men and women to their deaths. But where the Ripper seemingly killed for the sheer thrill of it, Holmes had ulterior motives – namely money. Most of his victims were the unwitting targets of insurance schemes and romance scams. And unlike his British counterpart, who committed all but one of his crimes outdoors, the nefarious ‘Dr Holmes’ preferred the privacy of his own home: 601–603 West 63rd Street, a sprawling three-storey structure, aptly dubbed the ‘Murder Castle’ by the Windy City press. Having been gutted by fire shortly after his arrest in the autumn of 1894, Holmes’s ‘Murder Castle’ is a bit of an enigma. According to contemporary reports, it possessed a labyrinthine layout, replete with secret passageways, soundproof rooms and a network of chutes and trapdoors purportedly designed for the fast disposal of dead bodies. But was it purpose-built for murder? The oft-repeated story that Holmes hired new building crews each week to ensure that no single person knew the property’s layout is likely apocryphal. Instead, he was probably attempting to cheat his contractors out of fair pay. Holmes’s astonishingly high body count may too have been exaggerated – he confessed to 27 murders, of which only nine have been confirmed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-BordenHouse92SecondStFallRiverMassachusetts1892-24f9fc3-e1773938890143.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a two‑storey wooden house with a gabled roof and a leafless tree in front" title="230 Second Street, Fall River – where 32-year-old Lizzie Borden allegedly murdered her father and stepmother – is one of America’s most notorious addresses" /> 6. The Lizzie Borden House, Fall River, Massachusetts, United States 230 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts. At first glance, this modest clapboard cottage hardly stands out in a city where the streets are lined with Victorian buildings – many of them far grander than this home. But this is actually Fall River’s most famous landmark: the Lizzie Borden House. Almost all Americans know of the alleged crimes of the accused axe-murderer Lizzie Borden. Outside of America, however, Lizzie is perhaps less well-known. And yet, most will be familiar with this little ditty: Lizzie Borden took an axe Gave her mother forty whacks. She gave her father forty-one. Andrew Borden now is dead, Lizzie hit him on the head. Up in heaven he will sing, On the gallows she will swing. But if all you know of Lizzie is the morbid nursery rhyme, you don’t know much. On the morning of 4 August 1892, Lizzie Borden, the 32-year-old daughter of Andrew Borden, a wealthy yet miserly property developer, allegedly killed her stepmother, Abby, using a hatchet. Lizzie struck 18 (not 40) blows to Abby’s head in an upstairs bedroom. When her father returned home from work for a mid-morning nap on the parlour sofa, Lizzie killed him with a more conservative 11 whacks as he slept. Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators? The second verse gets it wrong too. Lizzie was acquitted of the murder charges in 1893, thus escaping the gallows. She then lived out the rest of her days in a larger, more luxurious home purchased with her father’s fortune – worth about $9.5 million (£7.5 million) in today’s money. And if we are to believe the reports of thrill-seeking tourists, Andrew is hardly singing up in heaven. He’s moaning right here on earth, forever stuck in his former home, now known as the Lizzie Borden House, a murder-themed bed and breakfast since 1996. Ghost-hunting guests claim to have encountered Andrew, Abby, their family maid Bridget – and even Lizzie herself – in the house. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-GettyImages-51096199-6211f5a-e1773938947804.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a patterned wallpapered wall with dark stains and a closed double door." title="The basement room at the Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs met their end. The wall has been torn apart by investigators looking for bullets and other evidence of the crimes committed there (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. The Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, Russia The fall of the House of Romanov, the imperial family that ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917, irrevocably shaped the history of their country – and indeed, the world. As anyone with even the faintest recollection of their secondary school history lessons will recall, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and subsequent execution of his entire family laid the foundations for the first socialist state in history. What most of us will be less familiar with is the house that hosted that fall: the Ipatiev House, a fairly unassuming former merchant’s home in the city of Yekaterinburg. Built in the 1880s for mining industrialist Ivan Redikortsev, the two-storey neoclassical manor would have been perfectly in keeping for a man of Redikortsev’s station, just as it was for subsequent owners: gold-dealer IG Sharaviev and military engineer Nikolai Nikolayevich Ipatiev. But for a family who had once resided in some of the most resplendent residences in Russia – including the 2.5-million-square-foot Winter Palace in St Petersburg – it was something of a downgrade. In the spring of 1918, Tsar Nicholas, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, their five children and household staff were moved into the house, where they would spend 78 days confined to just four upper-storey rooms. Under the watchful eye of Bolshevik guards, the prisoners were occasionally permitted time outdoors – though the house’s modest grounds with their oppressively high fences would have paled in comparison to the Tsarina’s private garden at the Winter Palace. Finally, on 17 July, the family was ordered to the Ipatiev’s basement where they were executed by firing squad. Meanwhile, the house itself wouldn’t fall until 1977 when it was demolished under the orders of the Soviet government. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Church on the Blood was erected on its site, with a cross marking the exact location of the Romanov murders. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-JohnSowdenHouseLosAngeles-e1773939013743.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A geometric, reddish‑brown building partially hidden behind dense tropical plants, including palms and large-leafed greenery" title="Despite its impressive architecture, Sowden House is best known for being the former home of George Hodel – the prime suspect in the infamous ‘Black Dahlia’ murder" /> 8. Sowden House, Los Angeles, United States Like many old Hollywood mansions, Sowden House is steeped in a long and colourful history. Constructed in 1926 for its namesake, artist John Sowden, for nearly a century the property has played host to lavish parties, film crews and fashion shoots. It’s featured in Oscar-winning films like LA Confidential and The Aviator, and reality TV programmes like America’s Next Top Model. But did it also bear witness to one of the most notorious unsolved murders in American history? On the night of 14 January 1947, did the enigmatic ‘Black Dahlia’ take her final breath in the bowels of this 5,600-square-foot fortress of luxury? Maybe… Located in Los Feliz, a hillside community east of Hollywood, Sowden House is one of countless mansions in this upscale district. Yet, even in a sea of swanky properties, it sticks out – partly owing to its unusual appearance. Composed of giant concrete blocks configurated and carved in designs meant to mimic an ancient Maya step pyramid, the house is perhaps the most iconic example of the Mayan Revival Movement of the early 20th century. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of achievement for architect Lloyd Wright (not to be confused with his more famous father, Frank Lloyd Wright). Surprisingly, however, none of these things are what Sowden is best known for. Its main claim to fame is for being the former home of one Dr George Hodel, a prominent LA physician and prime suspect in the 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short – a 22-year-old budding starlet (christened the ‘Black Dahlia’ in the press on account of her raven hair), whose mutilated and dismembered body was found in a vacant lot, six and a half miles south of Sowden House. Aside from his surgical skill and supposed sadomasochistic interests, there’s actually very little to connect Hodel to the crime. Still, legions of armchair detectives are convinced of his guilt. His own son, Steve Hoddel – a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department – is adamant that the Dahlia’s dismemberment took place in the basement of his childhood home. Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author who specialises in Georgian art and architecture. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025)